How well do India's Multiple Language Dailies Provide Political Knowledge to Citizens of this Electoral Democracy?

This article investigates journalism's supply of political knowledge to citizens in India's democracy. The contribution of newspapers to informed citizenship is measured by content analysis measuring the quantity, quality, and regional equality of political knowledge distribution. The cont...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journalism studies (London, England) England), 2015-09, Vol.16 (5), p.734-749
Main Author: Mody, Bella
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
agenda-setting
armed struggle
Content analysis
Democracy
India
informed citizenship
Journalism
Mao
Media
Modi, Narendra
political knowledge
Press
representation
Singh, Manmohan
state-nations
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Summary:This article investigates journalism's supply of political knowledge to citizens in India's democracy. The contribution of newspapers to informed citizenship is measured by content analysis measuring the quantity, quality, and regional equality of political knowledge distribution. The content area selected for analysis of newspaper representations is the indigenous armed struggle modeled on China's Maoist revolution, the alternative to electoral democracy that both the Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi administrations consider India's greatest internal security threat. All coverage from 2011 to 2012 in the highest circulation daily in each of five languages (Hindi, Telegu, Bengali, Urdu, and English) was selected for analysis. Findings in this article focus on the differences in the amount of coverage, topics that set the public agenda, how they were framed, and how the stories performed on a specially prepared news comprehensiveness index. Concerns are raised about significant regional inequalities in political knowledge supply to distinct linguistic electoral constituencies that are pulling at the seams of this young multiple-nation democracy. The article closes with a question relevant to all democracies: can for-profit news organizations be relied on as the only pillar of public citizenship education essential to democratic functioning?
ISSN:1461-670X
1469-9699
DOI:10.1080/1461670X.2015.1054185