War or Peace Journalism: Exploring News Framing of Kashmir Conflict in DAWN Newspaper

 This paper employed the Johan Galtung’s model of Peace Journalism [1][2] -as functionalized in Siraj [3]-to examine the coverage of Kashmir Conflict in DAWN newspaper, one of the leading English language dailies in Pakistan. The research was guided by three questions; to what extent the coverage of DAWN is dominated by peace or war journalism, what are the DAWN’s preference of Kashmir conflict news and their Editorial choices, and lastly, what is the DAWN’s strategic placement of Kashmir related stories. It was a quantitative content analysis supplement with qualitative commentary. Data source for the study was the two year coverage of DAWN, starting from 01 July, 2016 to 30 June, 2018. The study was theoretically informed by Galtung’s Model of Peace Journalism. Nineteen frames; nine Peace Oriented, Nine war oriented and one Neutral, as has been explicated by Siraj[3], were selected according to which the data was scrutinized. The study selected the whole news story was taken as coding unit. SPSS was used to analyze the data whereas tables were constructed in MS Word. The study found that the DAWN newspaper coverage of Kashmir conflict was dominated by war frames, news stories (Hard News) were published more as compared to other types of news items, and finally, more stories were published on the National page. Media by default cover conflicts in war approaches, creating hype and focusing on the visible effects. Therefore, the potential of Galtung’s PJ Model encourages and provides guideline to use peace oriented approaches in the coverage of conflicts.

Ajmal Khan: communication university of China

Ajmal Khan, War or Peace Journalism: Exploring News Framing of Kashmir Conflict in DAWN Newspaper, International Journal of Media Science Works, Vol. 06, Issue 10, PP. 1-6, October, 2019                                                                              

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