Effects of Political Polarization of Media on Contents Credibility and Consumers in Pakistan

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between political polarization of Pakistani TV news media and their contents' credibility among consumers. For this quantitative survey study, the data was collected from the youth of Lahore, mainly media students of six universities i.e. three each public and private sector through cluster sampling and employing the instrument of a purpose-built questionnaire comprising 20 items. Marshal McLuhan's (1964) work "Medium is the Message" provided theoretical basis of the study. That data was analysed through SPSS while tests of Cronbach alpha and beta test applied. The study results revealed that TV news channels political polarization affected the youth consumers significantly negatively (β=-0.449) while contents' credibility also affected negatively due to political polarization of channels (β=-0.180). This study recommends media channels, PEMRA and policy makers to ensure non-partisan political coverage to increase their contents credibility and viewership

Factors Associated With Information Credibility Perceptions: A Meta-Analysis

“…Third, we only synthesized the effects of 12 factors on credibility perceptions, which is not exhaustive. Factors such as political polarization (e.g., Sarwar et al, 2020) or message emotionality (Vendemia, 2017) were not considered. Future research should aim for a more comprehensive analysis by examining additional factors.…”

The Impact of the Digital Environment on Consumer Satisfaction in Pakistan's Media Industry: A Quantitative Analysis

“…Little research has been done to assess the connections between the media's digital environment and viewers' CS (Asif et al, 2019;Sarwar et al, 2020). Thus, the CE, CM, and PQC, as media forecasters of the digital environment, can open up yet another new line of research toward viewers' CS.…”

“…No national or local channel follows the same political agenda or ideology. The diversity of television channels has significantly impacted the overall programming quality (Asif et al, 2019;Sarwar et al, 2020). TV networks are in rivalry with one another for TRP due to their rapid expansion, which forces them to lower the content quality of their programs.…”