Abstract
Over the past two decades, India and Pakistan have been involved in several activities regarding bilateral trade normalization. These developments have been concentrated around three periods: the late-1990s, mid-2000s, and early-2010s. Are these waves of trade-related activity reflected in popular media coverage? This question connects to a longstanding and important criticism that media coverage on India–Pakistan relations is preoccupied with security events, to the exclusion of non-security issues such as trade. A dearth of popular awareness on trade-related activities between India and Pakistan may limit the extent to which it is politically feasible for governments to further invest in trade normalization, or perhaps the extent to which the public pressure politicians to do so. This paper measures the quantum of nearly two decades of media coverage on India–Pakistan trade, among five newspapers: Times of India (TOI), Economic Times (ET), Business Standard (BS), New York Times (NYT), and Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Results indicate that ET, BS, and WSJ capture the dynamism of trade-related activities between India and Pakistan. TOI and NYT, by contrast, do not. The paper considers why underreporting in the TOI and NYT is problematic, and identifies future research directions.
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Notes
- 1.
The concluding section of this paper engages more robustly with agenda-setting theory in the context of reporting on India–Pakistan trade.
- 2.
NDMA is the nomenclature that Pakistan is adopting in place of Most Favored Nation (MFN).
- 3.
Translates as ‘Hope for peace’, see http://amankiasha.com/.
- 4.
Coefficient of Variation (CV) is a function of Standard Deviation (SD), divided by mean.
Abbreviations
- BS:
-
Business Standard
- CDP:
-
Composite Dialogue Process
- CV:
-
Coefficient of Variation
- ET:
-
Economic Times
- MFN:
-
Most Favored Nation
- NDMA:
-
Non-Discriminatory Market Access
- NTB:
-
Nontariff barrier
- NYT:
-
New York Times
- SAARC:
-
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
- SAPTA:
-
South Asian Preferential Trading Arrangement
- SD:
-
Standard Deviation
- TOI:
-
Times of India
- WSJ:
-
Wall Street Journal
- WTO:
-
World Trade Organization
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Acknowledgments
This paper has been written as part of research studies conducted under the project “Strengthening Research and Promoting Multi-level Dialogue for Trade Normalization between India and Pakistan” led by Dr. Nisha Taneja. The author is thankful to Dr. Aparna Sahwney, Dr. Nisha Taneja, Dr. Sanjib Pohit and panelists at the India–Pakistan Annual Conference held on 21–22 January, 2014, for comments.
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Mediratta, R. (2017). Media Underreporting as a Barrier to India–Pakistan Trade Normalization: Quantitative Analysis of Newsprint Dailies. In: Taneja, N., Dayal, I. (eds) India-Pakistan Trade Normalisation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2215-9_12
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