School of Journalism and Mass Communication

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Browsing School of Journalism and Mass Communication by Author "Abdalla, Nsobya Abdulhakim"

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    The print media’s role in promoting the East African integration process: the case of the Tanzania daily news and the Uganda new vision
    (University of Dar es Salaam, 2015) Abdalla, Nsobya Abdulhakim
    The study examined and analysed the role of print media in promoting the revived East African Community (EAC). This investigation was undertaken amidst complaints that East Africans were not well-informed about the core EAC integration issue due to scarcity of EAC topics in the mass media even as regional integration processes continue to advance at both the political and economic levels. The study employed both qualitative and quantitative type of research approaches. The Triangulation Mixed Design helped the researcher to approach the study from more than one angle which improved the researcher’s understanding of the real problem. This study used a sample of 120 issues for both the Daily News and the New Vision. This figure is derived from the randomly selected 10 days per month in six months for the two daily publications. Thus there were 60 issues from The Daily News and 60 issues from The New Vision and each date selected was the same for both newspapers. Using comparative analysis of Daily News and New Vision, the findings reveal that both newspapers have granted some space for East African Community topics. The study has established that the Daily News (67%) published more articles on EAC than the New Vision (33%). Further analysis from the study revealed that the Daily News (69%) published more EAC articles on its first four pages of the newspaper than the New Vision (31%). The analysis also confirmed that the Daily News (85%) reports more on other EAC member states than the New Vision (15%) with Kenya (Daily News; 77 and New Vision; 20 articles) taking the highest coverage and Burundi (Daily News; 07 and New Vision; zero articles) taking the least. However, there is still scarcity of EAC topics in both newspapers and more coverage is required to make East Africans make sense of the integration process. Therefore, East African newspapers should strive to ensure that the quality and quantity of EAC news increase in their daily newspaper issues in a bid to raise awareness on the EAC regional integration at the grassroots level.