US Presidential Polls 2016: Presentation of Election News on Bangladeshi Newspapers
Dependency over International Media and Partial Attitudes
Mridha Md. Shiblee Noman
Abstract
The US presidential elections 2016, like previous occasions, drew global attention in which Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the country. The eyes of Bangladeshi media were upon that elections too and they published news on the last US presidential polls with due importance. Presidential candidate Donald Trump accused global news media several times of giving negative and degrading coverage to his election campaigns. Against the backdrop of Trump’s claim, this paper intends to explore how the US presidential candidates were presented on four national dailies in Bangladesh. The author was interested to examine the level of dependency of Bangladeshi newspapers on the international news media in case of covering the elections, knowing the fact that most of the Bangladeshi media could not appoint their own correspondents to cover the polls. In terms of theory, the starting points are media imperialism and agenda-setting. The author analyzed the content of the international pages of four Bangladeshi national dailies of 15 days to understand the phenomena of news presentation on the elections. The key findings are i) a total of 51 sentences and 16 paragraphs were found in the news containing biased comments toward one particular candidate made by the writers concerned, and ii) Bangladeshi newspapers were almost cent percent dependent on international media to cover the events related to the elections.
Keywords
US presidential election, newspaper of Bangladesh, international media, dependency, presentation of news
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