🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates the mechanisms and journalistic implications of conflict framing in Indian general election news, examining its interplay with media modality, ideological bias, and policy issue coverage. Drawing on 2014 and 2019 news reports from seven major English-language outlets (television and print), the research employs a hybrid annotation approach combining rule-based and supervised learning, cross-modal textual alignment (news reports versus original political speeches), and statistical modeling. Results reveal that conflict framing is primarily driven by media modality—television outlets deploy it significantly more frequently—rather than ideological positioning: most outlets exhibit no systematic partisan bias in assigning “perpetrator/victim” roles. Crucially, conflict framing correlates with a 62% average reduction in substantive policy content coverage (e.g., agriculture, infrastructure). The study demonstrates how medium-specific technological logics structurally constrain political discourse quality, offering critical non-Western empirical evidence for global election news framing research.
📝 Abstract
In covering elections, journalists often use conflict frames which depict events and issues as adversarial, often highlighting confrontations between opposing parties. Although conflict frames result in more citizen engagement, they may distract from substantive policy discussion. In this work, we analyze the use of conflict frames in online English-language news articles by seven major news outlets in the 2014 and 2019 Indian general elections. We find that the use of conflict frames is not linked to the news outlets' ideological biases but is associated with TV-based (rather than print-based) media. Further, the majority of news outlets do not exhibit ideological biases in portraying parties as aggressors or targets in articles with conflict frames. Finally, comparing news articles reporting on political speeches to their original speech transcripts, we find that, on average, news outlets tend to consistently report on attacks on the opposition party in the speeches but under-report on more substantive electoral issues covered in the speeches such as farmers' issues and infrastructure.
