Understanding Media Functions Through Belief into Action Scale: A Case of Islamabad-based Pakistani News Reporters

Abstract

The current research focused on exploring the inclination of Islamabad-based news reporters to get influenced by their religious beliefs while performing different media functions of civic, service, loyal-facilitator, disseminator-interventionist, watchdog, and infotainment as part of their professional roles. The study adopted the “Belief into Action Scale to deploy a quantitative cross-sectional survey and collected data from 310 news reporters serving in various print and electronic media organizations in the Federal Capital. The findings of the study revealed that the influence of religious beliefs varied between gender groups, with male news reporters being more influenced than their female counterparts. Similarly, older news reporters were more influenced by religious beliefs as compared to younger colleagues. Moreover, this influence also varied among the news reporters performing different media functions, with Loyal-Facilitators, Disseminator-Interventionists, and the ones who performed service and civic roles scoring higher on the variable of Religious Beliefs and Practices.