GENDER REPRESENTATION IN SENSITIVE NEWS STORIES: A TALE OF THE PAKISTANI PRINT MEDIA

Gender-sensitive reporting is a recent issue in the feminist media studies. Especially in the sphere of crime reporting, it is very necessary to maintain an ethical standard when one must report gender sensitive news. Gender-sensitive issues always involve feminist interpretations by the media practitioners, issues like domestic violence and sexual harassment are not properly reported by the newspapers. An element of the sensationalism is a major portion of the news related to the rape and kidnapping. Media should give special consideration to the gender-sensitive news with an eye of social responsibility and ethical boundaries should be seen in the report. In this research focus is given to the frequency of gender-sensitive news in terms of the gender representation and a comparison is given between frequency of crime news and gender-sensitive news in two newspapers which includes one Urdu and one English newspaper to advance the understanding about the coverage about the gender representation in the media. Additionally, a separate comparison among the gender-sensitive news stories is also analyzed to explore the frequency of gender-sensitive news covering the male and female. Then, further analysis is conducted to explore the gender-sensitive news stories which represents the women that how much coverage represents the gender-sensitive issues about the household women and working women