The Framing and Partisan Bias: A Systematic Analysis of News Reports on Bangladesh’s Student Movement in 2024

In August 2024, Bangladesh witnessed an unprecedented event of a forceful fall of a 15 years long reigning political power, led by Sheikh Hasina, as a consequence to the massive student movement. Shortly after, a wave of discussion and news coverage surfaced from the international media outlets. Criticism and debates rose among the Indian and Bangladeshi netizen regarding the fall of the government and the prime minister’s asylum in India. Several news covered by Indian news channel, Republic Bangla, were alleged to be in favour of the fallen party by the netizen. This study will investigate the possible bias, framing and propaganda in the reports of the student movement of Bangladesh in 2024, by an Indian news channel, Republic Bangla. The previous papers on such issues studied the tone of news delivery, selection of the contents, highlighting specific story or party in order to prove the presence of framing and bias in a news content. Accordingly, a content analysis is performed to count the number of stories, statements, accusations or praise, in order to determine how much the channel is being supportive or critical towards the stakeholders of the movement, which also determines the bias. Following this, the type of contents is analyzed in order to find any framing or propaganda the channel could frequently working on. Lastly, a comparative study is done in accordance with the other sources to find out the political leanings and ideology. The findings confirm the presence of bias, framing and propaganda as well as the political leanings of the channel. These findings suggest that the media was indeed biased and enforced propaganda and framing. The findings and procedures can be implied for further research in the field.