The research paper and newspaper coverage

In my research paper titled ‘Media Molding Public Action: Compassion Fatigue and Gang-Rape in India’, I explore how compassion fatigue, a form of desensitization in the audience, resulted from the ways in which the two rapes were covered.This played a role in muting the reactions after the Mumbai incident, and this may have happened because the Indian media did not take compassion fatigue into account when covering the two incidents. Taking the analysis further, I also argue that this shows how the Indian media must embrace its responsibility not only in covering tragedies, but in covering them in a certain way, to take into account the influence they wield over public action and opinion.

I analyzed newspaper articles from two major Indian English daily newspapers – The Hindu, and The Indian Express. Overall, I studied 50 articles, 25 pertaining to each incident. From each set, 10 were selected from The Hindu, and 15 from The Indian Express. In terms of timeline, I restricted the period of coverage to the day after the incident (when they were first covered), to seven days later. Despite all the similarities, one of the key differences between the two incidents is that the victim of the December 16 gang-rape unfortunately succumbed to her injuries thirteen days after the event, whereas the victim of the August 22 rape survived. Thus, it would be understandable if there was greater outrage in the former case after the victim’s demise. By examining public reaction within the first week, we witness the strange phenomenon of different levels of public reaction to crucially similar incidents.