The perceived credibility of the Ethiopian private, federal and regional television channels

Abstract

The detaining, arresting and holding of journalists for more than half a year without formal charges in addition to the war and conflict in Ethiopia between different ethnicities and regional states motivated these authors to explore rising issues of perceptions of media credibility in Ethiopia. The main focus of this study was to assess the audiences’ perceived credibility of the Ethiopian federal, regional and private television channels. The participants of this study were people living in two regional states and one capital city of Ethiopia (i.e. Amhara, Oromia and Addis Ababa). A total of 600 participants were chosen from the three places included in the survey, using snowball and convenience sampling techniques. The data were collected through the survey and analysed using non parametric statistics (Mann Whitney U Test, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test, Kruskal Wallis Test and Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test) using SPSS version 26. Results indicated that the federal and private television channels enjoy more news and medium credibility than the regional television channels. However, the audiences’ perception of the credibility of journalists from the television channels of the federal, private and regional states showed no statistically significant difference. The results of the study suggest that the television organizations, journalists and policy designers need to work harder to bring credibility to the regional states television channels in addition to ensuring credibility to the federal and private television channels.