ArticleAuthors: William O’Brochta (2019)
Riot reporting is one aspect of newspaper coverage that can drive people into the streets in acts of collective protest or violence.
Media observers and scholars have proposed that the language of Indian newspapers, be it English or vernacular, partially dictates the kinds of riot events reported and the quality of those reports.
I tested whether this conventional wisdom holds by investigating the content of Indian riot coverage in the English Times of India and Hindu Hindustan. While Hindustan emphasized official statements and interviews with political parties, neither newspaper accurately represented the actual number of riots in their reporting. In fact, coverage in both papers fo...