Poverty and underdevelopment for more than three decades have constituted central agenda for discussion among the governments of both developing and developed nations obviously with a view to evolve workable solutions. At the end of its year 2000 summit, the United Nations came up with eight interdependent goals otherwise known as Millennium Development Goals that mandated all the developing member nations to tackle development problem by 2015. Nigeria’s adopted economic policy of addressing the goals is the development of SMEs. The fact that people’s expectations are high regarding the policy therefore explains why this paper tried to evaluate the volume and prominence of media coverage of SMEs and particularly, its impacts on national development in Nigeria. This was done by using thematic content analysis of four selected print media in Nigeria. A total of 1,728 editions of two newspapers and 576 editions of two magazines were selected for a study that covered 12 years. Among other things, the study revealed that both newspapers and magazines did not give necessary attention to the coverage of SMEs, it also showed that the amount of coverage and the degree of prominence given to SMEs and related issues were not strong enough to translate to national development.
Keywords: Mass Media, SMEs and National Development
