Reporting ethnic violence: Context, text and practice of journalism in an Indian city.

摘要

This dissertation examines the reporting of ethnic violence, which in Indian English is called communal riots, in Ahmedabad, India. The research is premised on the model that journalism like any cultural product is best understood in its relationship with the social world, the creator and the receiver. The study of the creators, or journalism practice, is based on a theoretical framework of influences on media content that includes the individual orientations, media routines, organizational pressures, extramedia factors, and ideologies.; Addressing the lacuna in research on media and ethnic violence, the research is conducted as a case study with three parts. First, the context of the reporting is presented using historical, geographical, economic, demographic, marketing and survey data. Second, a close textual analysis, which draws upon different strands of discourse analysis, of the reporting of the violence in five newspapers, three Gujarati (Gujarat Samachar, Sandesh , and Gujarat Today) and two English (Times of India and Indian Express), is presented. Lastly, long interviews are used to show how an interaction between the backgrounds of the journalists, beliefs about journalism and its ethics, and professional routines come together to result in the texts of violence that are analyzed earlier.; The findings suggest that the reporting of the violence was uneven. The same incidents were differently accented and the journalistic genres of news and views were blurred. Such a style shows the privileging of authority, the importance of geographic location and identity in covering incidents and different modes of blame or causality. Theoretically, the research suggests, albeit tentatively, that the media be construed not as causing riots but as working to harden identities among ethnic groups. Also, the study shows that reading coverage about ethnic violence off the ideologies of journalists or of ownership structures is not useful. Rather it is the interaction between individuals, organizations, routines and contexts that have to be closely examined. Hence, normatively this research offers multilevel suggestions for an ethical coverage, which is rooted in the Gandhian idea of trusteeship instead of a purely consequentialist view of media coverage.