Abstract

This study explores what factors Kenyan journalists perceive influence their assessment of progress in the country and in what ways they believe their world-views impact their reporting. The study also assesses the journalists' awareness and knowledge of national progress achieved in development indicators. The study took an exploratory approach and used a mixed research method design. Nine semi-structured in-depth interviews with Kenyan journalists were complemented with a multi-choice web-survey. The survey was circulated using the snow-ball principle and after an eight-week period, 74 survey responses were collected and analyzed. The study reveals that knowledge, newsroom experience and the negative bias of news are all factors that journalists report influence their perceptions, although many of the journalists did not believe their perceptions affect their reporting. The study also found that the journalists overestimated their actual factual knowledge of progress and underestimated the actual progress achieved in the country. On average, the journalists picked the right answer in about a third of the fact-based questions, which were related to the country's performance in development indicators. Considering that journalism plays a vital function in society, the research suggests cross-sector discussions and further studies should be carried out on potential knowledge gaps and possible cognitive biases of journalists.