Framing of Arab Conflicts in India by the Leading Private News Channels NDTV 24*7 and CNN-IBN

During Arab “Spring”, two broad frames emerged from the coverages by Indian news television: Western and regional. The former caters to the West for its primary viewership whereas the latter is an alternative to CNN for the Arab region. During the conflicts, Indian news television catered to the dominant western perspective due to feeds from western news agencies. So when the Arab Conflicts got mediated to India, a non-participating zone, then it was only likely that the western perspective would dominate the audio-visual narratives because of continued dependency on the western news agencies as has been demonstrated earlier conflicts like invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Through a qualitative framing analysis, this research looks at how Arab Conflicts got mediated by NDTV and CNN-IBN, the two leading private English news channels. An analysis of news packages by the two channels during the year 2011 with respect to framing of issues, stakeholders and sources reveals a stronger presence of western perspective in the audio-visual narratives in spite of the fact that channels correspondents contributed almost the same number of stories as those from the western sources.