Political Transition and Frame Shift in Elite Newspaper Narratives of Pakistan-United States Relations: From PTI Security-Geopolitics to Post-PTI Sovereignty-Economy Reset

Abstract

This paper discusses the ways in which the elite newspapers coverage of the Pakistan-United States relations evolved during the PTI government and post-PTI transition. It is founded on the thesis data, methodologies, results, vocabulary and references well. The theses corpus employed is an extended opinion-ecosystem corpus of 154 retrieved candidate records of Dawn, The News International, The New York Times and The Washington Post. The major analysis corpus comprised 98 strong- include units. The approach involved a mix of qualitative and quantitative content analysis, with inductive frame development, in the form of frequencies, cross- tabulations and chi-square tests. This article predicts time findings. The Pak-US relations during the PTI period were guided by the geopolitics/great-power alignment and security/counterterrorism and Afghanistan. It had 67 strong units in the PTI period and 2021 with the highest of 36 strong units, representing the Afghan withdrawal, the Taliban reentry and the Biden administration review and the no bases debate. During the post-PTI era, 31 strong units of the corpus and the preponderant interpretive milieu changed towards sovereignty/ anti-interventionism, economy/trade/IMF, diplomatic reset and democratic legitimacy. The primary-frame association by period was statistically significant, Chi square(4,N=98) = 30.30, P=.001 with Cramers V=.56 which is a strong frame shift. Security was only found as a primary frame of PTI-period and economy/trade/IMF was found only in the post PTI period. The two periods had the sovereignty but it enhanced respectively following the PTI government. The paper concludes that the transition of the PTI to post-PTI did not merely weaken or strengthen elite opinion discourse about Pak-US relations; it merely altered the terms in which the relation was viewed. The thesis constraint maintained in the paper is that, valence was coded To code and accordingly sentiment distributions are not provided.