ONE DEATH, THREE REGIONS AND TWO STORIES: A STUDY OF THE MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE KILLING OF OSAMA BIN LADEN IN PAKISTANI, BRITISH AND AMERICAN MEDIA

This research study explores the death coverage of Osama bin Laden across the seven media outlets of the three countries – US, UK and Pakistan. These three countries are closely tied to each other in the fight against terror, and have also suffered a lot in this regard. This study focuses only on the content of the selected media outlets which includes both print and electronic media. These include: The New York Times from the US, The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian from the UK, the Geo News, the Duniya News, Pakistan Television Corporation and the daily Dawn from Pakistan. The basic research question raised in this study is:
How the seven identified media outlets across the three different countries covered the death of Osama bin Laden?
This basic research question is supplemented with some additional research questions to explore the content from different dimensions in order to show a broader comparative picture of the coverage carried out by these identified media outlets in these three countries. This study focuses only on the content of the broadcast and print media outlets. It does not explore the production of the content.
The research study is based on ‘Quantitative Content Analysis’ and has examined 957 news articles.
The findings support that despite being close allies in the ongoing War on Terror, two different set of stories appeared. It includes: the story of dominance and reliance; the story of joy and grief; the story of mistrust and incompetence; the story of success and embarrassment; the story of politics and geostrategic interests; the story covered through joint reporting and individual reporting; the story reported from the field and studio; and the story of mistrust (among the allies) and the future of the war on terror.
Additionally, this research study also investigates the questions whether most of the coverage, of the selected media outlets, was based on counterterrorism, i.e., highlighting the narratives of Allies vs bin Laden; or show the impact of bin Laden’s death on the future of War on Terror, on the volatile region, or even on the Al Qaeda itself. It also points out that how these media outlets approached the Pakistani government, Pakistani military/ Intelligence Agencies, and the US government/ Army – besides looking at the rhetoric used for Osama bin Laden and Abbottabad Operation.