MEDIA CREDIBILITIY AND PARTICIPATION IN A DEMOCRATISED MEDIA ENVIRONMENT IN MALAYSIA

The advancement of technology has changed the entire media industry landscape and creates competition between traditional media and new media. Since then, the concept of media credibility has also changed. Thus this study is designed to construct and test new media credibility scale. It focused on how education and media perception influence the usage of media among audience. It also researched on how media usage and media credibility affect audience opinion participation. Data were collected using questionnaire from 210 respondents in Kajang, whose age are between 20 to 70. Analysis shows that media perception has a significant relationship with medium credibility but not with news credibility. Media consumption shows no significant relationship with both dimensions of media credibility. However, medium credibility is not a significant predictor of participation to express an opinion. Instead, media consumption comes out to be a significant predictor of participation to express an opinion. Nonetheless the finding is confined to those who uses online new media and among those below the ages of 30 years. In the older age group, there is no significant relationship between media consumption and participation to express an opinion regardless of which media they consumed.