News as Nationalism: Analysing India-China Border Conflict on India’s Two Leading TV Networks

This paper considers the role of Indian TV news in producing and publicising nationalistic narratives during the 2020 India-China border conflict: first major border clash since the 1962 war between the two neighbours. Grounded in framing theory and using nationalism as its contextual framework, this study will report the findings of a thematic discourse analysis on the introduction section of prime-time debate shows on two of the most watched English language news channels in India: Republic TV (the overtly nationalistic network, which claims to have the largest audience share) and Times Now (part of the Times of India group, India’s largest and oldest media organization). Evidence gathered revealed a prevalence of six nationalistic frameworks deployed by the two news networks in their coverage of the border row: (i) Attribution of blame (ii) Anti-China bias (iii) Defining the enemy of the nation (iv) Strong emotive appeal (v) Discrediting the military might of the enemy by exaggeration and hyperbole (vi) Selective description. The paper questions the limits of peace and conflict theory in comprehending the role of media in conflict situations and the results reinforce the idea of taking into consideration of domestic factors while analysing media coverage on contested international issues. The study also shows that the US-led Western media continues to be a dominant player in setting the global media agenda and news media in countries such as India still struggle to reach wider global audiences, despite the existence of an English-language 24/7 news economy. In the absence of a global impact, the focus of news networks has been, specifically, to exploit the (re)emergence of majoritarian nationalism to cater to an increasingly politically polarized domestic audience.