ABSTRACT
The first data set was on environmental items in two newspapers in each country-one chosen to be slightly more upmarket, the other more popular. We have commented on the selection of the newspapers-The Independent and the Mirror in the UK and the Express (English language) and the Navbharat Times (Hindi) in India-in Chapter 1. In the case of the UK papers it is probably easier to distinguish the first paper as appealing more to the intellectual classes, and the latter paper to the lowermiddle and working classes, than it is possible to make any such simple distinction in the case of the Indian papers. Here the issues of language and region are so much more prominent. The selection of the Express (the Pune Edition) is not too problematic-it is appealing to the middle range of English-language readers-the middle élite, if that is not too oxymoronic. The choice of the Navbharat Times was more problematical. It is published in Hindi-we needed an Indian-language paper-and the chosen edition is from Bombay, the nearest city to Pune (Keval Kumar’s base) where it is published. To some extent this immediately reveals it is not a ‘typical’ vernacular paper-perhaps a better representative of that would have been something like the Dainik Jagran published in Madhya Pradesh, a Hindi-speaking area (see Chapter 4). Most of the papers in Bombay serve its predominantly Marathi and Gujarati-speaking population, and the important English-speaking élite. But there is also a large and growing community of migrants from North India who are Hindispeaking and who provide yet another market. The Bombay edition of the Navbharat Times is published for them. We should also point out that, as it belongs to a large group (The Times of India Group) and it is published in four cities (the others being in the Hindi belt-see Table 4.3.2), the Bombay paper has quite wide resources to draw on. We could have chosen a more local and vernacular paper-but had we done so it is clear that, like a local evening newspaper in the UK, it would have been dominated by local news, and we would have had to sample several such papers to get any general feel of their environmental contents.
