Percepciones de los Electores Ecuatorianos sobre los Medios de Comunicación durante el Proceso Electoral de 2021

The main objective of this work is to provide an approximation to the main perceptions that Ecuadorian voters had about the country's media, both traditional and digital, during the 2021 presidential election process. The information was collected through a survey , which was prepared based on a representative sample, called "Study of Politics and Emotions in Ecuador". The data collection was led by the Political Research Team of the Santiago de Compostela University, being applied to a sample of 1,000 people (N=1,000) over 16 years of age, after the first electoral round. After different crosses of variables, it was found that, despite the rhetoric of some political analysts about the growing influence of new technologies in the Ecuadorian electoral campaign, the information shows that the use of social networks for the consumption of political information was minimal. and not relevant. In general, all media, both traditional and digital, had low credibility during the Ecuadorian electoral process of 2021. Although it is worth noting that traditional media such as television and print newspapers had more credibility than the average of the media as a whole. and even more so on digital sites, which received the worst evaluation. However, it is worrying that the media and especially the new information technologies in the country have, on average, a very weak acceptance by the interested public and consumer of political information. These results show a low quality of information and/or credibility on the part of Ecuadorian journalism, which in recent years has been experiencing serious difficulties due to issues mainly of economic and political origin, even before the pandemic that strongly affected the country.