Print Media Coverage of Political Parties in Pakistan: Treatment of Opinion Pages of the Daily Jang and Daily Dawn

Abstract

Historically, Print media especially newspapers in Pakistan were considered as mature and objective in their business. Currently, the phenomenon of ‘popular and crispy style’ of editorials is being explored for enhancing the readership of newspapers. Theperceptions we make in our mindsabout the worldare mostly basedon second-handreality which sometimes creates distortion in the information we receive whether it comes from media or any other channel of communication. Therefore, the role of media in framing certain aspects of political parties for the target audiences has been drastically enhanced in recent decades. The present study has focused on the coverage of political parties in the light of framing theory. The mainstream media covered these activities of the parties differently as some newspapers gave huge coverage while some others gave moderate or low coverage. The goal of this research study was to explore how leading dailies Daily Jang and Daily Dawn covered main political parties PTI and PML-N in the light of Indexing theory