ABSTRACT
Mainstream news media all over the world tend to cover international conflicts with a nationalistic bias and reinforce the ideological and strategic positions of the state voluntarily. In doing so, they offer a distorted view to the audience, jeopardising their credibility to a great extent. South Asian news media follow a similar pattern in covering regional conflicts. Drawing upon the theoretical notion of news frames, this chapter explores significant patterns of news coverage, contending that TV channels of two neighbouring countries supported the popular and state discourse on Kashmir. Against the historical backdrop of cross-border hostilities in Kashmir, this study analyses how TV news in India and Pakistan cover the conflict. Using textual analysis as a research methodology, it examines TV talk shows on NDTV in India and GEO TV in Pakistan covering the Indian surgical strikes on 29 September 2016. The analysis reveals that the top TV talk shows of both countries framed the conflict as a warmongering discourse, treated Kashmir as a colony, and created the social reality of the cross-border encounters against objective facts on the ground.
