RESEARCH OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SMC-PRIVATE) LIMITED(ROSS) & PAKISTAN SOCIAL SCIENCES REVIEW (PSSR) adheres to Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International License. The authors submitting and publishing in PSSR agree to the copyright policy under creative common license 4.0 (Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International license). Under this license, the authors published in PSSR retain the copyright including publishing rights of their scholarly work and agree to let others remix, tweak, and build upon their work non-commercially. All other authors using the content of PSSR are required to cite author(s) and publisher in their work. Therefore, RESEARCH OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SMC-PRIVATE) LIMITED(ROSS) & PAKISTAN SOCIAL SCIENCES REVIEW (PSSR) follow an Open Access Policy for copyright and licensing.
How to Cite
Exploring the ‘Civil Repair’ Role of Media: A Case Study of the Easter Bombings in Sri Lanka
Abstract
On the day of Easter Sunday April 21, 2019 within the span of 20 minutes in Sri Lanka there was a chain of six coordinated suicide attacks in historical churches and standard hotels in the capital city Colombo along with other places. The attacks left at least 253 people killed including at least 35 US, UK and Indian nationals. Media all around the globe took up the incident immediately and produced a variety of a discourse on it. Jeffery C. Alexander stresses that media in such conflict times produce a ‘solidarity discourse’ to play a ‘civil repair’ role in the society. This study is an effort to explore and analyze the discourse produced by The Daily Mirror; a Sri Lankan newspaper, and by The Express Tribune; a Pakistani newspapers. Employing the ‘ideological square’ and the ‘lexicalization’ strategies of the Critical Discourse Analysis proposed by van Dijk the researchers intend to explore and identify whether and to what extent the selected newspapers have played the role of ‘civil repair’ by producing the ‘solidarity discourse’ in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan Easter Bombings. Findings show that The Express Tribune played the role of ‘Civil Repair’ by producing the ‘solidarity discourse’. However, the Sri Lankan Newspaper; The Daily Mirror’s coverage lacked the ‘solidarity discourse’ in the aftermath of the Easter bombings.
Authors
Zahir Khan
MS Scholar, Department of Media and Communication Studies, The International Islamic University Islamabad, Pakistan
Dr. Muhammad Junaid Ghauri
Lecturer, Department of Media and Communication Studies, The International Islamic University Islamabad, Pakistan
Riffat Alam
Assistant Professor, Department of Mass Communication, The Karakoram International University, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan
