Media Framing of Pakistan-United States Relations in Pakistani and American Elite Opinion Journalism: A Comparative Analysis Pre and Post PTI Government

Abstract

The paper discusses the manner in which the elite newspapers in Pakistan and America illuminated the relationship between Pakistan and the United States between the era of the government of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and the recent era. It is based solely on the study data, study methodology and study findings and does not include any new empirical findings to the study data. The analysis is based on the expanded opinion-ecosystem corpus of 154 retrieved candidate records that includes 98 strong-include units as the primary corpus of analysis. The chosen sources included Dawn, The News International in Pakistan and The New York Times and The Washington Post in the United States. The authors employed quantitative and qualitative content analysis, which was based on inductive frame development with the assistance of frequencies, cross- tabulations and chi-square testing. The study has determined that there are five main frame families; geopolitics/great-power alignment, security/counterterrorism and Afghanistan, sovereignty/anti-interventionism, economy/trade/IMF, and democracy/governance/rule of law. This article previews the cross-national comparison. Pakistani news outlets stressed national interest, autonomy, mistrust, sovereignty and pragmatic involvement. The U.S. press element, which is predominant in the working corpus by The Washington Post, introduced Pakistan in the light of security, Afghanistan, democratic norms, press freedom and press strategic orientation. The greatest frame in total was geopolitics with 40 out of 98 units rated strong or 40.8. The frames that each had were security (24 units), sovereignty (24 units), economy/IMF (12 units). democracy/rule of law had smaller analytically relevant frames (12 units). The outlet-by-frame test was not statistically significant on conventional level, chi-square(12) = 19.21, p =.084 but Cramer V= .26 showed that it carried a practical difference of moderate magnitude. This paper concludes that there was no mere agreement versus disagreement regarding the view of Pak lead elites and their American counterparts regarding the Pak-US relations, but a construct of the relationship by each press system by each national position. The study constraint that valence was not yet coded and, hence, sentiments conclusions cannot be reported is maintained also in the analysis.