FRAMING THE KILLING OF BIN LADEN IN NATIONAL PRESS: IMPLICATIONS FOR US PUBLIC DIPLOMACY

Abstract

The killing of Bin Laden was arguably a watershed moment in the US led global war on terror. A considerable scholarship has been conferred about the media framing and US counterterrorism, intriguingly hitherto no academic study is available how the incident was framed in the national media milieu. This study makes a modest attempt to fill this academic lacuna by exploring how the national press of Pakistan framed the killing of Bin Laden in their editorial discourses and what could be its possible implications for the US public diplomacy. Drawing on the framing tradition as framework and qualitative analysis as methodology, the study findings reveal three dominant discursive frames the press employed to construct the narratives about the killing of Osama Bin Laden and the events ensued namely: Ambivalence/ US-staged drama, Sovereignty violation, and Pakistan under US threat to overarching anti-American frame. The discussions elaborate the contribution of the study and the implications for the US public diplomacy toward Pakistan