Media houses such as the radio or TV run on two major programmes; news spotlight and entertainment shows. They have served as a vital source of education and entertainment to the public. Over the years, more focus has been on entertainment shows to increase view ratings of the media channel. Media Channels such as UTV, GTV, TV3, Peace FM, 3FM amongst other channels with exciting entertainment shows are seen to have higher view ratings than news inclined channels. In 2017, Adom TV was ranked as the TV channel with the highest views with 662,000 average viewers (January, 2021). Adom TV has lots of entertainment shows such as Kumkum Bhagya and other local shows. The channel was also the first to show India soap operas in the local dialect (Twi).
The objective of this research was to establish the most preferred media; radio and television. Though radio existed far back from the 19th century, television usage is on the rise with lesser interests to radio. However, it was imperative for this research to establish where much preference lies. To understand which media has the highest ratings, we surveyed which type of media channel is more preferred. This was to map out if entertainment shows are more preferred than news spotlights. This is to say, every media channel has their area of specialty and what it is well known for though in some cases, there is a hybrid. To be more factual on the arguments on if either of these media is still used in the 21st century where mobile devices are used for watching entertainment and news, this research also queried the interests of participants in radio and television.
The research was responded to by persons from the Central Region, Eastern Region, Greater Accra Region and Western Region all in Ghana. It was majorly answered by people in the Greater Accra Region with an average of 86% followed by Eastern Region, Central Region and Western Region respectively. This gives a collective sample for analysis because there were respondents from the four (4) main regions chosen for this research. The highest age range was 20 – 35 years followed by 36 – 59 years which meant that most of the respondents were the youth.
The television media in its sensational and visualization capacity puts itself first with 86% of respondents preferring that to the radio media withstanding their preference to either news or entertainment. The major difference between radio and television is graphical representation. Radios also have entertainment programmes however, its lack of graphical representation reduces interest. This
With television, there is the ability to interact and connect with people. News programs are able to view scenes on the news they are reporting and entertainment programs are able to visualise which makes it a more preferred option to radio which are just sounds. Entertainment shows emerged as the most preferred program with 65% of respondents preferring that to programs on news spotlights. That is not to say that they have no interest in news programmes since they also provided news TV channels in response to their three most watched TV channels.
With regards to the most watched TV channel, TV3 topped the list whereas Peace FM topped that of the radio channels.
It can be concluded that these two media stations are best in news and entertainment.