Newspaper and Audience Bias Alignments in Pakistan

The next speaker in this v IAMCR 2019 session is Sehrish Mushtaq, whose interest is in the relationship between the political affinities of newspaper readers and their selection of newspapers. Does personal bias align with the ideological bias of the newspaper?

This relies on an assessment of the political positioning of different newspapers, of course, which has been well researched for a number of countries (especially the United States). Newspapers are no longer directly aligned with specific parties, however, but there is a parallelism between the structures of the political system and those of the media system.

The present project applies this to the case of Pakistan, which has a medium-sized media industry. Here, media bias is largely commercially motivated, as different outlets seek to distinguish themselves from each other in order to attract a distinct share of the audience. Selective exposure theory suggests that this should attract readers with matching ideological biases – but there are also many studies that show that audiences do not necessarily selectively avoid counterattitudinal content at the same time. Audiences generally do not perceive much media bias in the media they choose for themselves, yet they may perceive other outlets (or the entire media system) as biased.

The project assessed the coverage of the mainstream political parties in three Pakistani dailies, in order to assess their respective biases, and also conducted a survey of newspaper readers. The newspaper bias study examined tone, picture, voice allocation, and dominance in the coverage, while the survey assessed political affinity, newspaper choice and frequency of reading, and perceived media bias.

This found an affinity between the political affinity of readers and the political biases of the newspapers – but newspaper choices remain mixed, so selective exposure cannot be the only explanation of newspaper choices. Some party supporters read papers whose coverage of their parties is neutral or even negative. This could also be the result of a media environment that has been highly constrained for a very long time, which has hindered the perception of media biases.