Pulse Asia: TV still Filipinos’ top news source

by Xave Gregorio – Philstar.com, 12 Oct 2021

MANILA, Philippines — Television remains Filipinos’ top source of news on the government and politics, dwarfing the share of radio, the internet and newspapers.

According to respondents to a Pulse Asia survey in September, 91% of Filipinos get their political news from TV, while 49% said they get it from the radio, 48% said they get it online and only 3% said they get it from newspapers.

Of the 91% who said they get their news from TV, 82% of them said they get it from national TV, while 25% said they get it from local TV.

Most of those who said they got their news from the radio got it from local radio, while most of those who got their news online got it from Facebook.

Of those surveyed, 37% of said they received news from family and relatives, while 25% said they got it from friends and acquaintances.

TV declines, Facebook dominates Pinoy’s internet

Despite the continued dominance of TV, it has suffered a three-point decline in the past 10 months while radio and the internet have seen a steady increase throughout the same period.

Some 63% of Filipinos use the internet, the poll showed, with 59% of them accessing it more than once a day.

Nearly all of them said they used the internet to access social media, while only 41% said they used it to consume news about the government and 24% said they consume news about the elections.

Facebook remains the top social media platform in the Philippines, with 99% of Filipinos saying that they have an account on it. It is followed by YouTube (57%), TikTok (17%), Instagram (14%) and Twitter (8%).

Facebook’s messaging platform Messenger is also the most used messaging application in the country, with 98% of Filipinos using it, overshadowing Viber (5%), WhatsApp (2%), Telegram (2%), WeChat (1%), Hangouts (0.3%), Signal (0.1%) and Line (0.03%).

Most Filipinos use messaging apps to talk to family and friends, but their conversations hardly touch on politics, the survey showed.

Pulse Asia said they surveyed 2,400 adults aged 18 and above for this poll, which has a ± 2% error margin at the 95% confidence level.

Digital News Report 2021, released by the Reuters Institute earlier this year, found that 87% of Filipinos said they got their news online, with 72% also saying they got their news through social media. Of respondents in that study, 61% said they got news through TV and 16% said they got it through newspapers.