Media Ownership, Funding and Challenges: Implication for State Owned Media Survival in Nigeria

This study examines ownership, funding challenges and its implication for state media survival in Nigeria. The study adopted two research designs- survey and focus group discussion. The participants comprised of 66 registered journalists from Taraba State Broadcasting Service (TSBS) and Taraba Television (TTV). The researchers examined the entire population in order to totally eliminate sampling error.The instruments used for data collection were the questionnaire and the focus group. Sixty-six (66) questionnaires were distributed to the sampled population. Out of the sixty-six (66) questionnaires, sixty-two (62) questionnaires which constitute (94%) were answered correctly by the respondents, while two were not returned and three were not aptly answered hence rendered void. Furthermore, a focus group discussion was conducted on the 5th of November 2017 with six participants from each media station that forms the sampled population. The people who took part in the focus group discussion were reporters and other top management staff. The data collected were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Intrinsically, the data collected through the use of questionnaires were analysed via the 2016 Microsoft statistical package using simple frequency counts and percentage, presented in arithmetic tables. Also, the data collected from the focus group were analysed qualitatively and this involves an in-depth description of the participants’ responses. The findings of this study established that government-owned media in Nigeria are currently in a very poor state economically, managerially, technologically and politically. In addition, misappropriation of the fund, shortage of staff, lack of modern/adequate equipment management, poor salary, inadequate funding and employment of nonprofessionals were discovered to be the major challenges affecting media outfits in Nigeria. In this view, this study suggests that under-funding, which is unfavourable to the operation of state-owned media should be avoided.