Coverage of Health News in the English-Language Newspapers of Pakistan: A Case Study of Dawn and The News

Abstract

This research study investigates health news coverage in the two mainstream English-language newspapers of Pakistan – Dawn and The News – to understand how they covered it. The researchers have focused on the frequency of published news stories, contributors of the news items; nature of coverage;contextualization and use of jargon in the published stories. The researchers applied the Quantitative Content Analysis to answer all the outstanding inquiries of this research project. Based on the data collected in February2019, the researchers found that both the newspapers played down the health-related coverage in their pages –besides relying on the same contributors to report it. The findings revealed that The News needs to bring more diversity in its coverage of different issues related to health, while Dawn needs to work on the language – by avoiding jargon. The Gatekeeping Theory guides the findings.