Communication Strategies Employed By 103.9 MMUST Fm to Capture Listeners’ Attention Regarding COVID-19 Pandemic in Lurambi Sub-County, Kenya

Abstract

he COVID-19 pandemic occurred so unexpectedly and spread so fast that the media had to play its role of informing and educating the public about it. The people were in panic and the Kenyan government invested in strategies to address this like the daily speeches and text statements on COVID-19 through the available media for the masses. This saw media stations such as MMUST FM change tact to improve on their efficiency and thus new strategies of communication were adopted alongside the existing ones. The current study seeks to investigate the communication strategies adopted by MMUST FM from 2020 to 2021 to capture the attention of residents of Lurambi Sub-County regarding COVID-19 messages. The study was guided by the Framing Theory of mass communication. It adopted the descriptive survey research design where a mixed-method approach was utilized to collect, analyze and present data. The participants were 115 residents of Lurambi Sub-County as selected using Krejcie and Morgan’s formula with a confidence level of 95% for a population of 188,212 people. In addition, 6 key informants comprising 4 MMUST FM producers and 2 COVID-19 health experts interviewed by the station at the time were purposively selected for in-depth interviews. Data was collected using questionnaires from the residents and interview guides from the MMUST FM producers and the COVID-19 health experts. The validity of the qualitative data was achieved by establishing trustworthiness while the validity of the quantitative data was calculated using Cronbach Alpha Co-efficient calculations. A descriptive analysis of the quantitative data while a thematic analysis of the qualitative data was presented. From the study, we also realize that the station used communication strategies similar to the other media stations during other pandemics such as message consistency, honesty, the language used and how humanity and empathy were communicated while advocating for behavior change. However, the study reveals that the strategy that stood out with 103.9 MMUST FM is the radio program that was slotted to address the issues about COVID-19 when the pandemic was at its peak. This among the existing strategies helped the station successfully broadcast on the COVID-19 pandemic.