Maltese University students’ consumption of political news

Abstract

The main objective of this paper was to find out whether Maltese University students follow political news, how frequently they do so, what triggers their use and their preferred medium of consumption. The Uses and Gratification Theory was adopted in a bid to find out five main reasons underpinning such use. These include the wish to acquire knowledge; to be aware; a sense of civic responsibility; the desire to accomplish something and the belief that political news has a direct impact on their lives. The five motives may be categorised into two motivational viewing needs interpreted by Katz, Gurevitch and Haas (1973) and termed “Cognitive needs” and “Social integrative needs” and one, identified by McQuail, Blumer and Brown (1970), and termed “Surveillance” (Katz, Gurevich & Haas, 1973b, p.166-7; as cited in Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1973a, p. 518). The findings of this study indicate that though students largely lack trust in political news content, the majority of the participants are relatively eager consumers of such news. Another intriguing finding is that they mistrust political news content because they consider it biased and loaded with agenda. This drives them to look for additional sources to compare conflicting news reports in a bid to form an objective opinion as possible. This study has also found that the newer digital media is successfully drawing students’ attention to such genre because these media platforms offer political news in a way that is more appealing to this demographic because of its convenience and ease of access to a wide range of news sources. Most of the participants predict an increase in news consumption though three students believe consumption is likely to remain static. In-depth semi-structured interviews were carried out with 10 University of Malta undergraduate students from various faculties and a qualitative methodology was adopted.