Analyzing the Portrayal of Political Leadership in Leading Pakistani News Channels : A Critical Analysis

Abstract

This study focuses on the framing theory as a lens to analyze the coverage and frames of political parties by two prominent news channels, Dunya News and Geo News. A comprehensive content analysis spanning over three months was conducted to assess the frequency, story types, frames, and tone of news coverage related to political leaders from 1st Sep 2023 to 20th Dec 2023 through purposive sampling. For this purpose, five themes, party manifesto, and plans, leader’s character, past performance of the party, voting worth, bias, and victimization were designed to explore the study’s objectives. The findings indicate a notable disparity in the salience given to political parties, with both news channels showing a higher emphasis on PMLN compared to PTI and PPP. Furthermore, the results reveal that Nawaz Sharif, received more favorable coverage from both news channels, followed by Imran Khan. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari receives comparable coverage to Imran Khan on Dunya News but notably less on Geo News. Additionally, the majority of the stance from these news channels leans in favor of PMLN leader Nawaz Sharif, while PTI leader Imran Khan tends to receive a more negative stance across both channels. A frames-wise analysis uncovers that Dunya News provides a more diverse range of perspectives when portraying political leaders, encompassing frames such as party manifesto, party previous performance, and voting worth, in contrast to Geo News, which maintains a more consistent distribution of emphasis across different frames. Findings also revealed that Nawaz Sharif’s frames prominently centered on the manifesto category. On the other hand, Imran Khan received coverage under the attributes of leaders’ character while party performance was a common attribute covered related to politicians.