Emotional Frames in Communal News Coverage: A Typology of Affective Structures in Indian Media

This research evaluated how emotion framing in news is helping shape community perceptions within the current digital globalisation and culture‐creating a wave that India is experiencing. It integrated multiple disciplines including sociology, media theory and cultural studies to provide an analysis of 55 news articles published across 11 different media outlets (e.g., Aaj Tak, NDTV, The Times of India) between January 2020 and March 2025. The study utilized framing theory (Entman, 1993) and symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969) as its theoretical foundation for conducting thematic analyses on the articles' respective frames. Thematic analysis produced five types of frames: Accredited (authority-based; 8%), Attributed (testimony-based; 20%), Event-Driven (based on events; 45%), Characterological (based on characteristics; 2%) and Consequential (based on consequences; 25%). The Event-Driven Frame contained the most negative affective components (44%), thus creating more intense emotions of an excessive amount of focus on the events without much context surrounding them (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The results showed significant implications posed by these frames for young people's ability to assemble and form coalitions in democratic discourse and for journalists' ethical practice within a globally-minded environment; and thus contributed to the field of social science by providing a typological framework for understanding affective narratives.