Social media cuts television, radio dominance as news source
Global messaging application WhatsApp was picked as the most used social media platform by 27 per cent of respondents.
The use of social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter to get news content has increased by 14 per cent over the past year, according to a new survey by the Media Council of Kenya (MCK), underlining the fast-changing local news consumption landscape.
Traditionally the most used sources of news for millions of Kenya, the survey released yesterday shows television and radio have significantly lost ground to social media with their use as the preferred news source falling 12 per cent and 5 per cent respectively during the period.
The survey was conducted in December from a sample size of 3,589 respondents of in varied age, religion, income and education level spread across the 47 counties.
It shows 24 per cent of the 3,125 respondents that attempted to answer the question picked social media as the platform where they get their information -- a significant rise from the 10 per cent who gave the same answer in the previous year’s survey that polled a nearly similar sample size (3,183).
Those who picked television and radio as their primary source of news fell to 35 and per cent and 31 per cent respectively last year, down from 47 per cent and 36 per cent in 2020.
At the same time, those who get news from friends, relatives and colleagues remained unchanged at 4 per cent as did those who read newspapers (1 per cent), while those who said they read news from online news websites grew from 2 per cent to 3 per cent during the period.
Global messaging application WhatsApp was picked as the most used social media platform by 27 per cent of the 2,978 respondents who attempted to answer the question, followed by its sister site Facebook at 26 per cent, both owned by tech giant Meta.
Meanwhile, 16 per cent said they use video platform YouTube, 9 per cent use Instagram, which is also owned by Meta, 8 per cent used Twitter while another 8 per cent used the fast-growing viral short-video sharing site TikTok.
The survey found 58 per cent of Kenyans that were interviewed consume television content on a typical day, which was extrapolated to about 16.74 million Kenyans that are aged 15 years and above.
This is a drop from the 74 per cent of respondents who said they consume television content from the previous year’s survey.
Radio content is consumed by 74 per cent of the respondents (about 21.45 million people), a consumption level that is nearly identical to that recorded in the 2020 survey.
Majority of the radio listeners consume local content (72 per cent) as compared to 28 per cent, who consume foreign content.
“The average time per day spent listening to radio was calculated to two hours. This is higher than the global average time spent listening to radio, which is one hour,” said the survey.
The survey also showed consumption of print content did not change much during the period, with 25 per cent of the respondents consuming print content, taken to be about 7.22 million Kenyans.
Only 46 per cent of those that go for print content buy hard copy newspapers, while 27 per cent access them via online subscriptions, also showing the changing readership dynamics in print news consumption in recent years.
The emergence of social media as a prominent source of news comes at a time accusations have been leveled at the platforms for being hotspots of misinformation, especially during pivotal moments such as the General Election, which will be on August 9.
However, Media Owners Association (MOA) Chairman Stephen Gitagama has pledged that media houses, which also have a significant following on social media, will dispense information that is factual using strong fact-checking processes to prevent spread of fake news.
“Let us set the agenda, let the politicians follow us, let the politicians come to us and we engage them. On the issue of misreporting, misinformation by our leaders, it is our responsibility as fourth estate to actually fact check, check those facts basic arithmetic, basic economics can lead us into getting good leaders,” said Mr Gitagama, the CEO of Nation Media Group.
