Influence of Social Media on News Reportage and Authenticity of Covid-19 Stories (Published)
This work evaluates the influence of social media on news reportage and authenticity of covid-19 stories. In conducting this study, the researcher raised three research questions and three hypotheses. User and gratification theory was developed in 1974 by Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch and Diffusion of Innovations theory by Rogers were used to build theoretical support for the study. The survey research design was used to evaluate the opinions of 53 sampled respondents from Passion FM Uyo and NTA Uyo. After the analysis, findings revealed that, social media has an influence on news reporting in Nigeria and that it also has influence on the authenticity of news reported. Finally, it was found that social media had an influence on COVID-19 news reporting. Based on these findings, it was recommended that users of social media should be wary of some of the contents they consume as unscrupulous users have been found to display misleading information that could be harmful to the public. Again, members of the public are encouraged to desist from the various abuses of the use of social media for the interest of greater number of Nigerians found to be users of the sites in search of various relevant pieces of information.
Keywords: Authenticity, Covid-19 stories, Social media, news reportage