Audiences’ Political Orientation, Evaluation and Verification of News in Ghana

Abstract

Today's information ecosystem exposes audiences to multi-faceted media choices characterized by debatably partisan-oriented media. Using an audience-centered approach in a cross-sectional survey of 419 respondents, we examined audiences' partisanship and evaluation of media content from politically affiliated news sources. We also considered the types of media the audiences rate as high in news-ness as reliable news sources and their intention to verify them. Moreover, we investigated whether audiences' ratings of story types are independent of their choices of the most reliable news source. First, the findings mostly showed no significant association between audiences' political affiliations and their ratings of partisan newspaper sources. Second, audiences held television (0.095) as the most reliable news source, followed by newspapers (0.119), and web/social media sites (0.236) were the least reliable. Audience segments variedly validate news from perceived trusted sources, with the highest tendency for validation toward television messages (0.119) and the least toward newspapers (0.236). Finally, the results showed that audiences' ratings of story types are not influenced by their choice of the most reliable source.