Framing Rural India in Mainstream Indian Press

Abstract

Media is a major democratic public institution that is discharged with the responsibility of bringing information on economic, social, and political relevance to the public. However, rural India, which forms about 68% of the Indian population, is given only 1-2% of reportage in the mainstream press. Moreover, it has been opined that even this 1-2% statistic is misleading as the majority of this news on rural India is about a handful of issues that are associated with to violence, crimes, accidents or disasters. While a majority of studies on rural news have analyzed them in quantitative terms, limiting to frequency or percentage of rural news, this study examines rural news via framing analysis. The present research has the following objectives: (1) to determine the dominant frames in rural news stories in the mainstream Indian press; (1a) to investigate whether frames vary according to mainstream Indian newspapers; (1b) to study whether some newspapers are high on the seriousness parameter (i.e. with respect to frames, episodic/thematic news, one-sided/two-sided news); (2) to ascertain the factors associated with journalists covering rural news lesser than urban news; (3) to ascertain the factors that are associated with a news organization covering rural news less seriously than others; and (4) to study framing effects of different frames used in rural news stories in the mainstream Indian press on public. newlineIn order to determine the frames in rural news stories, four newspapers - The Times of India, Danik Bhaskar, The Hindu and The New Indian Express were selected. 1200 news stories on rural news were coded by four independent coders based on Semetko and Valkenburg s (2000) Framing Scale. High inter-coder reliability was found between the four coders. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) revealed that frames significantly varied according to mainstream Indian newspapers with responsibility, human interest, economic consequences and conflict frames as the dominant frames in the mainstream newspapers. Morali