Coverage of Populism Related Content in Pakistani Media: An Analysis of the Coverage of Dawn and The News

Abstract

Populists are dominating the world's political situation. The election campaign of Donald Trump in the United States, the emergence of right-wing populist parties in Eastern Europe, and the popularity of Narendra Modi ofIndia prove that we live in a populist world. Populism has also returned to Pakistan as cricketer-turning politician Imran Khan's popularity was attributed to a massive publicity campaign. This article aims to evaluate the populist coverage of Pakistan’s political parties in media. This research study aims to answer the question of which political party shares more populist views, in what form they share it, and who the targets of these populist views are. Therese archer has utilized the “Quantitative Content Analysis” as a research method to answer the outstanding research questions. The news coverage of the two leading English-language newspapers of Pakistan, namely Dawn and The News International, has been studied. A total of 278 news stories we reexamined during the month of the 2018 elections. The findings support that Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf was the most populist party and the Shariffamily/PMLN was the prime target of anti-elitist views shared by PTI.Findings also support that The News International gave more coverage to populist narratives than Dawn.