IPL, politics and crime dominate

BY Indira Akoijam| IN Books | 16/07/2012

COVERING THE STATES- Part I: A two month scan of states coverage in 5 newspapers shows that The Hindu does a better job than the others.

INDIRA AKOIJAM finds that in some newspapers some states were not covered at all.

COVERING THE STATES PART- I

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Sample and methodology

The Hoot did a quantitative analysis of the coverage of Indian states among five English news dailies- The Times of India, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, The Hindu and The Economic Times. Delhi editions of these papers were taken. The period covered was April and May, 2012. News coverage was tracked for 50 issues, in 28 states.

* All pages were analysed except Delhi/ City, Editorial, Columns and Op- Ed pages.

* The Business and sports pages were included except in the case of Hindustan Times where the business section is a separate supplement.

* In tracking issues like political, business and economy only stories that were specific to the state were considered, as opposite to national level news originating from that state for some reason.

* For sports coverage, any sporting event located in a particular state was counted as a state story.

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How genuinely national are our national newspapers? How much do they cover all the states in the country? We took 4 general dailies and 1 business daily which have editions published from across India to see how well they cover news of people living there, the economy of the state and its political life.

The answer is a bit of an anti-climax. It’s not just television that is obsessed with cricket and crime to the exclusion of other news. In the sample period of April- May 2012, what our leading newspapers tracked more than most issues was the cricket played across the country! When the Indian Premier League matches were played in these months the country’s two highest circulated newspapers, The Times of India and the Hindustan Times, devoted as much as 20 per cent of their total states coverage to these matches. The Hindu followed with 15 per cent, and The Indian Express with 8.6 per cent.

PERCENTAGE OF IPL OVER TOTAL ISSUES PER NEWSPAPER

But cricket apart, two months of monitoring of the states coverage in five newspapers, including one business newspaper, shows that The Hindu had the widest state coverage, though one sixth of the total coverage was from Tamil Nadu alone. (And 25.6 percent of that was on IPL!) The second largest coverage was in The Indian Express. Among general newspapers The Times of India came fourth in its states coverage. The only business paper taken had very little news coverage relating to the states.

Over the two months, The Hindu carried 1614 stories originating in the states, followed by The Indian Express with 1340, the Hindustan Times with 1029, The Times of India with 1014 and The Economic Times with 181.

TOTAL NUMBER OF STORIES ORIGINATING FROM THE STATES

The study was revealing in terms of what makes news, and which states merit hardly any coverage. The three topmost categories of news were sports , politics, and crime. The IPL series which ran in these two months, merited the second highest coverage as a category, when taken separately from sports, next to political news.

The top four newspapers differed in what they covered the most. The Indian Express gave the single highest category of coverage to political news, the other three to sports. The Economic Times had a different order of top three categories of coverage: political, business and news related to Naxalism.

TOP 3 ISSUES IN EACH NEWSPAPER

S/N	THE TIMES OF INDIA	HINDUSTAN TIMES	THE INDIAN EXPRESS	THE ECONOMIC TIMES	THE HINDU
1	Sport- 293	Sport- 257	Political- 310	Political- 43	Sport- 336
2	Political- 165	Crime- 182	Crime- 204	Business- 26	Political- 268
3	Crime- 134	Political- 131	Sport-142	Naxalism- 15	Crime- 119

In all the papers taken together, the states which received the most coverage were Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka and Rajasthan. Maharashtra received substantially more coverage than other states, but this was substantially on account of IPL. Thirty six percent of all Maharastra coverage in the Delhi edition of TOI for instance, was on account of IPL! Indeed, more than 20 per cent of all states coverage in these two months in the Hindustan Times and The Times of India were on account of IPL. Without cricket, their coverage drops by a fifth!

STATES WITH MOST COVERAGE

S/N	STATES	TIMES OF INDIA	HINDUSTAN TIMES	INDIAN EXPRESS	THE ECONOMIC TIMES	THE HINDU	TOTAL OF STATES
1	Maharashtra	231	187	234	22	187	861
2	Tamil Nadu	107	66	77	5	269	524
3	Uttar Pradesh	92	125	155	8	130	510
4	West Bengal	82	101	93	25	191	492
5	Karnataka	101	66	60	18	120	365
6	Rajasthan	50	55	52	3	147	307
TOTAL OF NEWSPAPERS		663	600	671	81	1044	3059

Of the states which received most coverage, Uttar Pradesh, had the highest political coverage followed by crime. But most of these categories are dominated by a single story or two. The Aarushi murder case in Noida (which is part of Uttar Pradesh but comes in the National Capital Region) helped push up UP’s crime graph substantially, and likewise, Dimple Yadav’s election the political reporting coverage. West Bengal followed Uttar Pradesh and 54 per cent of all coverage given to the state was on account of coverage of Mamata Banerjee.

Which states accounted for less than a 100 news items each, over two months across five newspapers? Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Goa and seven out of the 8 northeastern states. The Hindustan Times had four stories over two months on Himachal Pradesh. Two out of these four were on the IPL matches played in Dharamsala.

STATES WITH LEAST COVERAGE

S/N	STATES	TIMES OF INDIA	HINDUSTAN TIMES	INDIAN EXPRESS	THE ECONOMIC TIMES	THE HINDU	TOTAL OF STATES
1	Uttarakhand	8	14	6		54	82
2	Jharkhand	12	18	31	5	15	81
3	Himachal Pradesh	14	4	23	1	30	72
4	Manipur	1	3	9	1	8	22
5	Goa	7	4	1	1	8	21
6	Arunachal Pradesh		6	4	1	2	13
7	Meghalaya	1	3	2		2	8
8	Tripura		6		1		7
9	Nagaland			3			3
10	Mizoram	1	1				2
11	Sikkim					1	1

The Times of India did not cover four states at all- Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim. Likewise, The Economic Times (Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram and Sikkim). In The Indian Express and The Hindu, 3 states merited no coverage at all. Sikkim was covered by no newspaper over two months except for a single story in The Hindu on football.

STATES WITH NO COVERAGE

TIMES OF INDIA	HINDUSTAN TIMES	INDIAN EXPRESS	THE ECONOMIC TIMES	THE HINDU
Arunachal Pradesh Tripura Nagaland Sikkim	Nagaland Sikkim	Tripura Mizoram Sikkim	Meghalaya Nagaland Mizoram Sikkim	Tripura Nagaland Mizoram

Though the maximum news reportage in The Hindu comes from Tamil Nadu (269 stories) did not confine its coverage to the southern states. Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh figures among the top reported states in this paper. Overall, 34% of The Hindu’s coverage was taken up by the Southern regions.

COVERAGE OF SOUTHERN STATES IN THE HINDU

SN	STATES	TOTAL STORIES
1	Tamil Nadu	269
2	West Bengal	191
3	Maharashtra	187
4	Rajasthan	147
5	UP	130
6	Karnataka	120
7	Andhra Pradesh	90
8	Kerala	72
9	Uttarakhand	54
10	Haryana	50

Even for a state like Uttarakhand, The Hindu accounted for the most coverage, 54 out of 82 total stories across all newspapers. Many of these related to power projects deals. By contrast, The Indian Express had only 6 stories on Uttarakhand in two months.

The Hindu also had the maximum number of business news-related stories (77) of all the papers, out of which, 35 were from Tamil Nadu.

The Indian Express had more political coverage than the other papers (310) followed by The Hindu (268). The least political coverage (131) was in the Hindustan Times.