Representation of Afghanistan Government and Taliban in Dawn and Ummat

Abstract

This research study investigates how selected mainstream Pakistani print media, Dawn and Ummat, represented the image of Afghanistan and the Taliban in its news coverage. The aim is to understand whether the selected two newspapers portrayed the image of Afghanistan and the Taliban positively or negatively. Dawn is considered the leftist newspaper that holds liberal views about the issues in Pakistan. On the other hand, Ummat is considered a right-wing newspaper with conservative views. The news content of both newspapers was studied from the 1st of January 2019 to the 31st of January 2019. Content Analysis has been employed as a research method in this study to answer all the outstanding research questions. The findings support that though most of the newspapers' discussion revolved around the US-Taliban peace talks, Ummat emphasized the Taliban's perspective more in the coverage. It was also revealed that both the selected newspapers relied more on the Afghan sources to share the Afghan government and Taliban's story with its readers. The research study is grounded on Goffman's Framing Theory.