The Rise of Social Media and its Impacts on Mainstream Media in Professional Journalism Observance in Zanzibar, Tanzania

The emerge and uses of social media in the recent years, has rapidly developed to majority of journalists around Africa including Zanzibar, the energetic participation of the professional journalists in this technological innovation has widened space and impacted ethical principles of journalism as a professional and raised the doubt to the public on trusting the mainstream media journalists in Zanzibar. This article discussed the findings on how far the emerging of social media (Facebook) affect journalistic ethics observance notable ’truthfulness, objectivism, balance and fairness and accuracy’ as a fundamental tool for the mainstream media journalism and how journalists used social media in their work. About 53.0% are on the views that social media affect principle of fairness, 46.34% journalists didn’t observe ethical principle of objectivism in their reports, 66.3% of broadcasting journalists reports contained bias, 43.4% of the reports has less of facts check-up while 45.56% contain false information that was the huge impacts of social media on observed principle of truthfulness to majority of journalists in Zanzibar. There for 56.6% shows that broadcasting media in Zanzibar lost trust to the public, therefore from this factual perspectives special efforts needed to overcome continuation effects by emphasising on in-house training, more emphasis on news room ethics and codes with special social media guidelines will be useful to ovoid ethical dilemma on media professionalism in Zanzibar, Tanzania.This Article Published at : International Journal of Academic Research in Business, Arts and Science, (IJARBAS.COM), N, 164- 199, Issue: 2, Vol.: 1, Article: 10, Month: August, Year: 2019