News Coverage Of Tibet In The Hindustan Times

With past Tibetan riots and increasing tension between Chinesegovernment and Dalai Lama government in-exile, the Tibet problem hascaused enormous concern of worldwide media. Many Chinesecommunication researches have set about studying how foreign mediacovers Tibet. Some found that Tibet was covered neither truthfully norobjectively by American mainstream media under most circumstances.(Fan Shiming,2000; Guo Yonghu,2011; Zhang Zhi rong and Li Yun,2006).The present study is aimed to explore how the Tibet issue wasreported by the Hindustan Times, the leading newspaper of India. Withframing as its theoretical framework, this thesis examined a number ofissues including story number and length, news type, bylines, placement,news page, theme, source, favorability, and frame by a combination ofqualitative and quantitative method.Results show that the Hindustan Times devoted extensive coverage ofTibet and allocated great space of homepage to the news storiespertaining to Tibet. In terms of bylines, the researcher found that theHindustan Times was inclined to use story by own staff and domesticnews agencies. With regarding to source cited, the data indicated that theHindustan Times heavily sourced on Dalai Lama’s government-in-exileand Indian government in news coverage of Tibet. In contrast, Chinese government, witnesses and participants of news events were downplayedand even ignored. Additionally, five topics including Tibet independence,activity of Dalai Lama, Tibetan self-immolation, border conflict, Chinesegovernment’s repressive policy, dam construction and water sharing weregiven great emphasis by the Hindustan Times. In terms of frame, therewere two dominant frames emerging from news coverage of Tibet: pro-Dalai Lama and anti-Chinese government. The former mainly focused onpraise of Dalai Lama from the aspects of personal benevolence, effort forfree Tibet and support given by “others” with positive tone whereas thelatter concentrated on criticism of Chinese government from theperspective of human right abuse, border invasion and dissatisfaction onborder dam construction and water sharing with negative tone. Besides,the underlying reasons for these findings also were explored in the paper.The present study may shed light on how the Hindustan Times coversTibet by means of framing devices and offer new insights for furtherresearches.