Editorial treatment of national and international political issues by Pakistani National Dailies for the period of three months (January 2014 to March 2014)

Abstract

Mass media can be defined as venues for messages that are created for consumption by large numbers of people. The media have remarkable impact on politics. This research study is intended to find out and analyze editorial treatment of national and international political issues by National English Dailies (Daily Dawn, Daily News & Daily Nation) from January 1, 2014 to March 31, 2014. Content analysis was used to explore editorial treatment. Editorials of the selected papers were taken as the Unit of Analysis. The Researchers selected all the papers published during the study’s stipulated period for analysis. The reason behind the selection of all the newspapers is that during the selected period so many important incidents occurred. Overall, 90 newspapers were analyzed. Coding sheet was used to gather data. Findings show that daily “The Nation” published more National political issues than others in select time period. It is also observed that daily “DAWN” published more international political issues than national. It is further observed that English dailies gave less space in favor of internal political issues. Results also show that the English dailies “DAWN”, “The New” and “The Nation” in term of treatment of national /international politics in the editorial gave more space to the Neutral sentences than favorable and unfavorable sentences.