Editorial Treatment of the Pulwama Attack in Indo-Pak Press: War and Peace Journalism Perspective

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to examine the editorial coverage of the Pulwama attack, a suicide bomb blast occurred in the territory of Pulwama, 20 kilometers away from Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir. For this purpose, the researchers examined three months editorials of the selected English dailies (The News International from Pakistan and The Times of India from India). The researchers used theoretical approach of war and peace journalism model proposed by Galtung (1986) and operational definitions were borrowed from Lee and Maslog (2005). The researchers have applied the quantitative content analysis to analyze the selected editorials published in the selected newspapers on the Pulwama attack. The study has investigated the prevalence of war and peace journalism frames in the editorial coverage after Pulwama attack. Results of the study shows that media has remained inclined towards war oriented journalism and war frames dominated the coverage while compared to peace frames. The Times of India used war-oriented frames significantly, whereas The News International used minimal war-oriented frames. On the other hand, The News International used a significant amount of peace oriented frames in its editorial coverage. While The Times of India rarely used the peace oriented frames.