Audience Perception of the Credibility of Local News Channels

Abstract- People get most of their news from television news channels. India has the unique feature of having news channels in English and in regional languages. Due to the cosmopolitan nature of the cities like Bangalore, there are news channels which are in English and Kannada broadcasting 24 hour news from the city. Common sense tells us that locally produced news and in the language of the people will have credibility as opposed to news coming from Delhi or Mumbai. Many studies have established this hypothesis that television news audience believes in local channels more than the so-called national networks. Credibility factor depends on a nine dimension credibility measuring scale. The researchers would like to find out if this hypothesis is right and the reasons for the same. For this a combination of audience perception study using a questionnaire would be conducted along with in-depth interviews with the programming heads of the local news channels. Index Terms- Credibility, local news channels, 24x7 new