By Joseph Were
Newsrooms and individual journalists seeking to positively impact the 2026 election must mix informing with confirming
Journalists covering the 2025-26 Uganda general election must be aware that the advent of digital media engagement has revolutionised their practice and that they must technologically retool to work in the shifting new environment.
Instead of the one-to-many media engagement of the radio, television, and newspaper era, news reports are now generated by a multiplicity of diverse actors in a participative and interactive way.
Statistically, with 301 FM stations, according to sector regular Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), more Ugandans might still rely on radio for their main media engagement, but the switch to the many-to-many communications of the digital era is real.
Preference for social media has risen from 10% in 2019 to 26%, according to a survey in June 2024 by GeoPoll, a US-based international research solutions provider. The survey was done in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa but it could reflect trends in Uganda and other sub-Saharan countries.
A recent media consumption report for Uganda by IPSOS revealed that although radio leads in media engagement at 70%, it has dropped from 89% in 2019. TV too dropped from 38% in 2019 to 37% in 2024 and newspapers from 8% to 7%.
Relatedly, Twaweza, an East African-wide non-governmental organisation that tracks citizens’ views, reports that WhatsApp is the most used social networking service in Uganda, followed by Facebook and TikTok. Others like X and Instagram are least preferred.
Based on such data, many experts predict that the 2025-26 general election news will be conveyed via a personalised news stream, filtered by a social network of friends, Facebook, and Google instead of mainstream media.
With so many voices in the mix, it will be difficult for citizens to separate fact from fiction, information from disinformation.
Coping with this new reality will require journalists to switch to new roles – as professional verifiers. Traditionally, the principal role of journalism has been to inform. In the post-truth digital era, the principal role of journalism is to double-check, debunk, confirm. The investigative tool kit for journalists has been superseded by the fact-check toolkit for every actor in the public sphere.
In the 2026 election, every media house should have a fact-checking team or – at a minimum – a fact-checking desk. Nora Martin, an academic researcher from University of Technology, Sydney, says in `The pressures of verification and notions of Post-truth in civil society’, that in this new era, the public will come to mainstream media to confirm or dismiss what they have gathered from social media.
The GeoPoll survey in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa revealed that although general media usage is highly integrated into people’s lives with 86% of respondents engaging daily, not all media are equal. Up to 57% hook on to social media, TV 25%, radio and websites 7%, and newspaper 2%.
However, when asked which source is most reliable for news and information, 35% named social media and TV. Only 9% mentioned websites and radio and newspapers 4%. But when asked how much they trust information and news on social media compared to traditional media (such as TV, Radio, newspaper), 35% said they trust both but 31% said they trust traditional media more compared to 30% for social media.
The GeoPoll team concluded: “The survey reveals a nuanced perception of trust across media platforms. A significant segment of the population (31%) still regards traditional media as more reliable than social media (30%). This reflects a skepticism towards the credibility of content found on social platforms despite their popularity”.
The popularity of social media, however, means professional journalists must also adapt its agility in capturing and broadcasting breaking news events more rapidly than traditional media. They must also use social media as an avenue for newsgathering, especially via access to citizen reportage.
In their election coverage, professional journalists; whether online, electronically, or in good-old print, must maintain a `personal brand’. Media houses too must cultivate a strong ‘news brand’ because the public will look out for bylines, mastheads, and TV and radio frequencies they trust.
According to the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), which is the world’s largest professional organisation devoted exclusively to broadcast and digital journalism, when disinformation becomes a significant threat, news professionals and newsroom managers must be part of the solution. Journalists must become the front-line protection against false and misleading information on all platforms.
Only free and independent journalists can fully assume the duty of providing needed information during an election. This supposes that they are up to the task professionally and have been trained in advance. That is according to the `Handbook for journalists during elections’ published by Reporters Without Borders as “a concise didactic work-tool that can help to prepare journalists who want to cover elections in an objective manner”.
Objectivity in journalism recognises that disinformation creates digital echo-chambers that exploit the human tendency to accept what confirms their personal biases and beliefs more than objective facts. It exploits bandwagon effects, group think, and group emotion. In the age of social media, following, liking, and sharing come before searching for truth and facts.
As a first step, therefore, journalists must be equipped to recognise misinformation which is not intentional mayhem-making, and disinformation and mal-information, which are intentionally unleashed to cause harm. The purveyors of disinformation intentionally troll, spam, amplify and viralise falsehoods or fake positivity.
All this is useful information for any newsroom manager or individual journalist aiming to cover the 2025-26 general election in a positive and impactful way. The preference for social media but trusting in traditional media is a significant paradox.
The GeoPoll survey listed 10 reasons respondents gave for their media preference, with trustworthiness as number one. Other reasons in descending order of importance include convenience, speed of updates, diversity of content, credibility of updates, user experience, interactivity, personalisation, cost and editorial independence.
The public media preference clearly favours social media and yet 51% of respondents ranked trustworthiness as number one and a significant number 31%, say traditional media is more reliable than social media. This means that a journalist’s job must shift from informing to confirming.
This is an opportunity for media houses to reinforce the difference between unreliable information provided by social-media under pressure to be first, gather more clicks, and gain more followers and reliable, accurate, and balanced information provided by mainstream media through journalistic rigour. The emotional association with accurate, fact-based truth telling will restore the journalist as a dependable authority.
This strategy may imply a core shift; from journalists as providers of breaking news stories gathered from authoritative sources to journalists as verifiers of news stories already available to the public.
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