The media landscape of Pakistan.
What do the 10 channels tell us about news and issues in Pakistan?
In a country with public participation in politics, the public needs to know what is happening and who is responsible.
The media tells us what is happening. In doing so, it has the power to shape our understanding of reality. The media has to decide what news gets to us, how we think about issues, and who to hold responsible.
How is the media in Pakistan taking these decisions? Are their decisions suspicious? Are all the channels just saying the same thing or completely different things? What do they want us to think about? And who do they blame when things go bad?
To answer these questions, we first understand the landscape of our media system by studying 2 years of broadcast from the ten most watched news channels in Pakistan.
We are working towards answering these questions:
Who does each channel support more and present positively?
Every channel covers similar issues, people and leaders. But how do they different in taking "sides". We measure the stance behind the coverage: when a channel talks about a party, person, or entity, is it positive or negative? And does that change after an exchange of power?
What issues do channels select to highlight?
There is always more news than can be squeezed in a day, so every channel has to choose. One channel spends the evening on a protest, another might never mention it. What a channel gives its minutes to tells us what it wants us to think about and not think about. We count these choices across all ten channels, every day and make a report.
Do the owners of the channels bias the news with their political preferences?
The news channels of Pakistan are mostly owned by business groups and families. The owners have their own politics and their own interests. So when a channel goes soft on a government or hard, is that the newsroom's judgement or the owner's? We compare coverage across channels to see if the ownership shows up in the news.
Are issues always framed in the same light: e.g. national security?
The same story can be told in many different ways. A protest can be a law and order problem or people demanding their rights. A flood can be about the victims or about the government's response. We measure which framing each channel reaches for, and whether some framings, like national security, take over issues that are not about security at all.
Data
Releasing data soon.
We have 480,822 broadcasts from the ten biggest news channels, transcribed from the original audio and translated into English, every line timestamped. laid end to end. That is years of round-the-clock television, readable as text. the collection is still growing.
