Army Public School Attack; A Comparative Study of Daily Dawn and The News International – The Elite Newspapers of Pakistan

Terrorism in Pakistan has made the environment gruesome for children with special focus. Army public school is witnessed in this regard. On December 16, 2018, it befell the school on the spur of moment. This terror attack dispersed the fracas around the setting of school located in Peshawar. On the second day, integrated media brought the fatal incident to the people throughout the globe. Therefore, this paper is aimed at determining as to how press of Pakistan treated the incident concerned editorials. The editorials excluding news stories, features, columns, article, and so forth of newspapers taken for this study as the units of analysis have been selected to know how they represented the issue. What terms the editorials of both newspapers used for the killers and victims.

Content analysis technique is used for analyzing the editorials as units of two newspapers for a week based publication. Editorial as a unit of analysis is taken to see as to what terms were used by both newspapers. It is found that daily Dawn newspaper fetches more different terms for attackers but The News International brings relatively less items as words for attackers. The daily Dawn newspaper employs the word ‘Militant’ more, while the News International exercises the words ‘Taliban’ and ‘killer’. On the other hand, the daily Dawn newspaper bring the word ‘helpless’ more into play, whereas, the News International draws on the word ‘victims’ instead.

It is, hence, recommended that both the newspapers must use appropriate terms for any kind of issue they bring on daily interval.