FRAMING FEMINISM: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF BBC AND DAWN’S COVERAGE OF THE AURAT MARCH

Abstract

The article investigates the portraying of Aurat March 2020 in two comparable news reports in English, in BBC and Dawn in a news cycle (7 and 8 March 2020). The data was qualitatively analyzed for framing using framing theory, the protest paradigm and feminist and postcolonial media scholarship, Entman (1993) four framing functions, source and voice allocation, participant representation and religious positioning. The BBC report framed the event as a threatened rights participant-centred frame, with marchers anonymized and pseudonymised as the primary definers; the Dawn report framed the event as a state-protected civic commemoration institutionally mediated frame, with the President, the Prime Minister, a federal minister and party politicians as the primary definers. Both reports were broadly sympathetic to the marchers, but they differed in the way they dealt with religion, with religion appearing as a resource of opponents in the BBC report, but as a shared and contested idiom collectively invoked by both supporters and opponents of the march and the state in the Dawn report. In both reports the struggle over the economic demands of the march was highlighted. Indeed, it is argued here that the difference in international and national coverage of feminist activism is as much to do with the 'distribution of voices' and 'conceptualisation of religion' as the evaluative stance, and that comparative studies of such coverage should be carried out on the same genre of texts.