Gatekeepers’ Gatekeeping Role Towards Upholding Human Rights: A Comparative Study of the Times of India & the Indian Express

In the contemporary world, news media provides an important platform where people raise different issues of their concern. The issues of the men and women, their rights and atrocities meted out against them, needs to be raised in various forums including the newspapers. This study is aimed at analyzing the newspaper coverage and understanding gatekeeper's gate keeping role towards upholding human rights of the people. To analyze the coverage of the issues relating to human rights, two mainstream national English dailies: The Times of India and The Indian Express were purposively chosen. The systematic random sampling technique was employed to select the contents of the newspapers between 01 January to 30 June 2017. Further, the study examines the existing frames in the news narrative of human rights issues through the frame analysis technique. It was revealed that the newspapers under study provided adequate coverage to human rights issues; but most of the times, the news stories pertaining to human rights were presented in negative frames. There has been a little variance in tonality and resonance of reporting between two newspapers under study. The findings also reveal that there were numerous incidents of human rights violations in the society to which the newspapers under study paid scant attention and it seems that they are not on the news agenda.