Coverage of Air Pollution in New Delhi in the Indian Press

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Madhavi Ravikumar, whose interest is in the way the Indian press frames environmental issues. This is against the backdrop of the severe air pollution crisis in New Delhi, and the present study builds on interviews with Indian journalists.

The mass media have served as a crucial platform for raising and debating environmental since the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s, and how they present these issues plays a significant role in shaping public opinion. Their selection and framing of issues is especially important in this process.

India is the second most populous nation in the world, and home to 63 of the 100 most polluted cities in the world; New Delhi has the poorest air quality in the world, and some one million people die in India each year from the effects of air pollution.

The present study examined the media framing of this issue in two newspapers: the Delhi editions of the mass-market English-language newspapers The Hindu and The Times of India, from October 2022 to January 2023. Both published around 25 articles on the air pollution issue during this timeframe, but coverage is largely by news agencies rather than by the papers’ own staff reporters.

These articles were categorised into pro-environment, pro-government, or neutral groups; 32 articles were pro-government, and 18 were pro-environment, so the papers largely followed government lines in their reporting. Interviews with journalists highlighted the selection of political over environmental coverage: the environment comes last in editorial decision-making. This explains the limited coverage of the air pollution issue.