Title: Avoiding Responsibility: Framing environmental issues in Hindi and English news during Indian general elections 2019
In this project, we try to understand the coverage of environmental issues in the Indian media, and analyse the convergences and difference between the way Hindi and English news media reports of the issues in the course of the general elections in India in 2019. Using the conceptual idea of 'framing' and methodologies such as frame analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis we seek to analyse environmental news discourse that emerged across three Hindi and English language news dailies, as they reported on ongoing crisis in environment in India, using the time general elections as a time frame. The aim of this work is to study the nature of environmental news coverage and examine if news coverage enables electoral discourse around such that they develop into compelling voting issues. Our findings indicate a break between narrativization of environmental discourse between Hindi and English publications. Through a close reading of 800 environment-oriented news headlines published in the span of the general elections cycle, and drawing comparison to the manifestoes of the two leading national parties in the fray, we see that these variances exemplify the unique divergent historical legacies and political cultures of journalism in the Indian press.
Keywords: Environment, Framing, Hindi media, Indian media