Azadi on the Idiot Box. An analysis of television coverage of Kashmir

Project Report from the year 2011 in the subject Communications - Mass Media, grade: 7.6, Swansea University, course: Erasmus Mundus Masters in Globalisation and Media, language: English, abstract: Kashmir has been a contested territory since the time of India's independence in 1947. In the summer of 2010, the deaths of a number of civilians, mostly teenagers, in renewed clashes with security forces led to widespread unrest. As the death toll mounted, public anger grew and cries of 'azaadi [freedom]' became louder, prompting some commentators to call this Kashmir's own intifada. India still suffers from low levels of literacy and public understanding of the conflict in Kashmir is largely mediated by television. This makes it surprising that there has been so little academic research on the representation of Kashmir in the Indian media in general and on television in particular. This is more unfortunate if one takes into account the passions which the Kashmir conflict arouses, the intensity of its coverage when it is 'in the news' and the fact that India has the largest number of commercial news channels in the world.This dissertation analyses the coverage of the 2010 Kashmir protests on two Indian commercial TV news channels, Times Now and CNN-IBN.