Violence & Conflict in Television News: A Content Analysis of The News Channels

Abstract

News media has been a source of multifarious information and has developed to a varied extent in the recent past. There now appears to be an increasing surge of propagation and dialogue on violence-related issues. Media violence has remained a viable topic of past research because of its impact on society and many studies focused on entertainment content. This study is aimed at analyzing the proportion of violence in news broadcasts and exploring the role of news channels whether they cover all or focus on specific issues. A total of 2577 stories were collected from 93 news broadcasts at 9 p.m. on “top 3” news channels; Dunya News, Geo News, and PTV News covering one month in January 2014. Of them, 1132 news stories were identified as ‘violent,’ which were further analyzed for the extent and nature of violence and their inclusion in the news bulletin. The study concludes that selected news channels presented less proportion of violence in terms of the number of stories and total stories per hour, but allocated a large amount of broadcast time to the small number of violent stories as compared to other issues. They reported political violence-related issues more frequently and there is a large content of violence in the headlines, especially on private channels. Keywords: Violence, Violence in News, Violent Content, Television News, Content Analysis