Kashmir and Conflict: Objectivity and Balance in News Sourcing
摘要
Journalistic balance and objectivity have been critical concepts of scholarly debate. While balance traditionally meant giving equal space to opposing views, newer models of impartiality aim to represent a broader range of perspectives. Using a quantitative content analysis, this chapter analyses news published in the two leading English dailies, Rising Kashmir from Kashmir and Daily Excelsior from Jammu of the Indian Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir from 1 to 31 October 2022. As many as 62 newspaper editions comprising 987 pages of broadsheets are examined and conflict-related news articles are sampled for analysis. A manual analysis is used to analyse the conflict news articles and identify the sources quoted in them. Study findings indicate the dominance of elite political sources in the news reports. Drawing from seminal studies in journalistic sociology, such as Gans’ “Deciding What’s News”, this chapter discusses the implications of the high prevalence of elite voices, comprising political, social and economic.