Politics through Sports and Cricket Diplomacy between Pakistan and India: A Case Study of National Daily Newspaper (Dawn Pakistan)

Abstract

Cricket is the most broadly played sports internationally as determined by leading global sport researches. It is extremely popular in South Asian countries. Pakistani and Indian public are great cricket enthusiasts and are very passionate about the sports. After the independence soon the diplomatic relations were formed. However the relations never guaranteed good relationship and have been mostly aggressive till now. The game of Cricket confirmed to be a vital connection among the public of the both nations usually tried to get together on the cricket ground or pitches even in the most hostile days. Cricket and media both may be exploited for escorting diplomatic relationship and can be a useful device in improving the relations among the both nuclear powers of Asia. Sports diplomacy offers to use sport as a channel to manipulate diplomatic, social, and political relationship. Sports journalism is a vital constituent of any news media association .Socio- political importance of sports journalism is always very obvious. The present study objective is to assess Pakistan media presentation and how it regards to the diplomatic relationship of the two nations via cricket reporting, exposure, positive or negative frames, element such as eminence, placement, pitch of the media coverage and content analysis. A sample of daily Dawn a national newspaper was obtained for this purpose. For data analysis, qualitative and quantitative methods were used. Content analysis was employed to verify the media reporting.. The time period chosen for study are the years 2011 and 2012 on the basis of cricket encounters involving Pakistan and India. The study observed that 2 games were played that is Semi-Final of World Cup (2011 ) on march 30th and second match in 2012 at Mohali on march 18th . Ninety stories were published in the selected newspaper throughout its coverage of the two cricket games. Out of which 55 reports have positive theme frames while 35 have negative theme frames. Coverage on front pages during study period was 27 while 63 stories were covered on sports pages. The study shows that the daily national newspaper has attempted to outline the content optimistically and tried to capture the interest of the people for acquiring harmony among the two nations for the healthier relations and as a regaining peace process. Finally it was concluded that diplomacy through cricket and media appearances assists to build up the needed atmosphere for the teams, public, political establishments and nations to facilitate to ease out the past hostility and tension rather than to resolved issues through force, economic compulsion, or majority forcing will on minority.