Repository | Book | Chapter

Bbc and African audience

insights from ethnography

Muhammed Musa

pp. 451-464

Forms of message delivery may have continuously changed, but audiences have constituted a central component of the communication process at all times. Notwithstanding this centrality, interrogation of audiences in the communication process has largely been informed by commercial imperatives such as advertiser need for information on ratings, organizational need for information on audience demographics and programme preferences by both commercial and public media, and so on. In its psychological phase, early audience research in Africa borrowed from the pioneering works of Merton (1968) and Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) in inquiring into engagement with media texts. Consequently researchers' engagement with media audiences focused on effect studies, which became the vogue in the early days of independence when the diffusion of modernizing innovations was emphasized.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-70443-2_25

Full citation:

Musa, M. (2018)., Bbc and African audience: insights from ethnography, in B. Mutsvairo (ed.), The Palgrave handbook of media and communication research in Africa, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 451-464.

This document is unfortunately not available for download at the moment.