New Delhi: News bulletins are preferred by nearly half of the news viewers compared to only 12 per cent favouring debate shows, a study on media in India found, highlighting yearning among people for old style of delivering news.
The Lokniti-CSDS study also found that more than 90 per cent active internet users use social media but on an average more than half of the each platform users have moderate or little trust on it.
Similarly, for news media, private channels and online portals are least trusted, while Doordarshan and newspapers are most trusted, the study suggests.
In case of news viewers, 49 per cent prefer news bulletins over debate shows while 12 per cent prefer otherwise, the study found.
“There also seems to be a yearning among news consumers to return to the old way of delivering news. In spite of the fact that news channels are increasingly choosing to have more debate-oriented shows than traditional style news bulletins, most news consumers in the survey preferred the latter than the former when given a choice between the two,” the report states.
The most used social media and messaging platforms by Indians currently are WhatsApp and YouTube, while Facebook has slipped to the third position.
On trust on social media platforms, 59 per cent of the respondents in the survey expressed very little to moderate trust in WhatsApp, while 13 per cent have no trust at all.
Similarly for Twitter, 54 per cent have very little to moderate trust, and 12 per cent have no trust at all.
“Even though most internet users are mostly engaged in using social media and messaging platforms on the internet more than any other internet service, nonetheless they do not trust the information that they receive on social media platforms very much. Very few active social media users were found to have high trust in the information or news that they receive on social media,” the study said.
Lokniti programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, in partnership with Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), undertook a India-wide study of media consumption behaviour to understand people’s day-to-day media practices and their media-related concerns and attitudes.
The study focused on both traditional and new media. It was conducted in 19 states.
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