Framing Victims: A Comparative Framing Analysis of Yemen and Syrian Conflict Victims in Pakistani Media

Abstract

The current research scrutinizes how political proximity plays a vital role in portrayal of conflict victims, happening in Yemen and Syria. Through the content analysis research demonstrate the victims of Yemen conflict are more tinted than the victims of Syrian conflict. In both the conflict, all the actors are having equivalent religious bond with the reporting media of Pakistan. This study demonstrates the political proximity between the media of reporting country and actors of the conflict, direct strong effect on the framing of the conflict victims. The result demonstrates that Saudis is having a strong political relation with Pakistan therefore in Yemen conflict Yemen government (backed by Saudi Arabia) is demonstrated as more positive and Houthis rebels as negative. On the other side, Syria does not have strong relation with Pakistan so Syrian war is demonstrated as confused war between different groups where no one is positively portrayed.  The result demonstrate closer the political proximity between reporting country and conflict actor, the greater the chance that actor will be highly empathized and opposite side framing will be highly brutalized.