REPRESENTATION OF ETHNIC PRESSURE GROUPS IN PAKISTANI MEDIA

Abstract

Media shapes the opinion of a public and the story of politics about pressure groups with the help of their representation. Such groups may or may not be validated in the representation and have an impact on their social acceptance and influence. Much research has been conducted on pressure group media portrayal. However, one would still say that research on how pressure groups are represented in the English Pakistani newspapers is lacking. Thus in the context of the wider umbrella of Agenda setting theory, the present research attempted to qualitatively investigate the evaluative representation of the pressure groups in the chosen editorials of English newspapers in terms of image building of pressure groups in Pakistan. Appraisal analysis indicated that the newspaper editorials had a seriously manipulative portrayal of the pressure groups by making use of the appraisal tools. PTM (Pashtun Tahafuz Movement) has been presented as democratic and rights based movement under state repression whereas BYC (Baloch Yakjehti Committee) is presented as a marginalized group struggling to seek justice but volatile through the use of number of different appraisal tools in an manipulative way such as metaphor, negative judgment, negative affect, negative appreciation, judgmental expression, heteroglossia, deontic modality, hedges, proclaimer, adverbial intensifier, up scalar, positive appreciation, positive judgment, monoglossia, positive affect, disclaimer.