Pakistani Print Media's Depiction of Natural Disasters Relative to NDMA Reports: An Eco-Critical Analysis

The study attempts to examine the way Pakistani news media cover natural disasters with reference to Natural Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) annual environmental reports from eco-critical standpoint. The major commendation the existing study holds is the inclusion of NDMA annual environmental reports and relevance of the issue as Pakistan is susceptible to natural disasters and news agencies are compelled to cover the recurring disasters. The existing study is a mixed-method research, used non-probability judgmental sampling technique incorporating frequently occurring natural disasters like earthquake, flooding, and land sliding. The data used in the study consists of 96 news items of top-tier newspapers of Pakistan counting The Nation, Dawn, and The News and 33 NDMA news items logically consistent with the nominated newspapers from the year 2018-2021 correspondingly. The research adopted the of Eco-critical Discourse Analysis model proposed by Arran Stibbe, (2015). Moreover, in order to detect the presence and frequency of substantial linguistic features, the study employed Antconc and USAS Semantic tagger. The results of the research accentuate the detrimental facets of news discourse and recommend ways to renovate the news discourse as encouraging and optimistic.