A CORPUS BASED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF COVID-19 POLICIES PUBLISHED IN GOVERNMENT AND PRIVATE NEWS AGENCIES, PAKISTAN

Abstract

This study reflects on the news content disseminated by public and private news agencies in Pakistan. There is only one public news agency Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) that publishes news on behalf of the government. It also provides raw data to private news agencies because it has the facilitation and capacity to cover most of the population in the country. The News (TN) is selected as the private news agency, which is a very well-known and trusted private news agency in Pakistan. This study is corpus-based, and I built two corpora-based on national news featured on government policy to control COVID-19 published by Associated Press of Pakistan and The News. The word limit in the selected featured news/article is between 400 to 500. The researcher has selected 25 articles each from APP and The News. The featured news articles were selected randomly from June 2020 to June 2021. The corpus of APP has based on 12750 linguistic items, and the corpus of TN is 12743. The results showed that public news agency structured positive narratives towards the towards government agenda and private news agency is prone to criticize government planning more. The research is not only helpful to create a comparison regarding government decisions about any policy but also how such journalistic criticism can bring authentic changes in the policies that reform the pandemic, social and cultural dysfunctions. The future political decisions and their effects could easily be calculated through the corpus-based analysis of contemporary narratives.