Constructing war in news: Discursive logics of the Pahalgam crisis in the Indian and Pakistani press

Abstract

This article investigates how Indian and Pakistani newspapers mediated the April–May 2025 Pahalgam crisis. Using computational text analysis of 5,972 war and conflict-related news articles concerning the issue, published during the period from the 22 April incident through the 10 May ceasefire, the study tests three hypotheses on attribution, treaty securitization, and the emotional framing of kinetic action. First, it was expected that Indian outlets would emphasize accusations more than evidence, while Pakistani outlets would stress denial and demands for proof. Second, coverage of the Indus Waters Treaty was anticipated to illustrate securitization, with Indian press framing suspension as punitive strength and Pakistani press emphasizing coercion and humanitarian risk. Third, during the 7–10 May kinetic exchange, Indian outlets were expected to merge anger and pride, while Pakistani outlets would highlight fear and victimhood. The results largely confirm the first two hypotheses, while the third reveals an inversion of expected patterns. These findings extend scholarship on the mediatization of war by specifying how legitimacy, treaties, and emotions are discursively constructed in Indian and Pakistani press narratives. The implications for theoretical, practical, and methodological debates are also discussed.

Keywords

India Kashmir media framing mediatization of war Pakistan securitization theory

Introduction

Armed conflict in the 21st century unfolds as much in media discourse as on battlefields. News coverage shapes how war is interpreted, remembered, and morally understood (Chouliaraki, 2012; Cottle, 2006). Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2010) describe this as “diffused war,” where information flows make battles simultaneously local and global. Media thus do not simply report events; they construct perpetrators, victims, and legitimacy itself.

These dynamics are acute in India–Pakistan rivalry, where history, security, and identity collide. Since 1947, both states have fought wars and crises while contesting legitimacy in international arenas. Their presses, formally independent but entwined with state security logics, often amplify national perspectives, indexing coverage to dominant elite cues and often reflecting dominant official security narratives during crises (Bennett, 1990; Robinson, 2000; Thussu and Freedman, 2003). During violent escalations, journalistic routines in wartime reporting can normalize state framings of blame and retaliation, reinforcing national identity and marginalizing counter narratives, especially in protracted rivalries such as India–Pakistan (Allan and Zelizer, 2004; Bose, 2005). Studies show Indian outlets frequently frame Pakistan as linked to terrorism and support retaliatory responses (Bose, 2011; Rasool et al., 2021), while Pakistani outlets emphasize denial, calls for proof, and narratives of victimization (Wasim et al., 2023). Such patterns exemplify Wolfsfeld’s “dual narrative,” in which opposing publics consume parallel but irreconcilable stories (Wolfsfeld, 2004). The April–May 2025 Pahalgam crisis exemplifies rapid mediatized escalation.

On 22 April, militants killed 26 tourists near Pahalgam, which India attributed to Pakistan-based groups without publicly verifiable evidence, a claim Islamabad rejected while calling for an impartial investigation (Ashtakala, 2025). India then suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, framed by Pakistan as illegitimate weaponization (Curtis, 2025; Reuters, 2025b). On 7 May, India launched “Operation Sindoor”. In response to that, Pakistan announced “Bunyan-ul-Marsoos,” on 10 May (Al Jazeera, 2025; Peri, 2025). After international mediation, a ceasefire followed on 10 May (TIME, 2025; Wikipedia contributors, 2025). These moves reflect three stages of mediatized conflict: blame attribution, symbolic weaponization, and emotional legitimation.

Hypothesis 1 (see literature review) would expect the Indian press to privilege accusation over evidence, while the Pakistani press foregrounds denial and demands for proof. Research on securitization shows elites and media can co-construct adversaries as existential threats, transforming accusations into legitimating narratives (Buzan et al., 1998; Entman, 1993). The Pulwama coverage in 2019 illustrated these dynamics: Indian dailies ritualized outrage in line with long-standing patterns of nationalist media logics (Bose, 2005), while Pakistani outlets emphasized dossiers and investigations (Rasool et al., 2021; Wasim et al., 2023).

H2 concerns the Indus Waters Treaty. Once suspended, the treaty became more than technical as it was securitized, framed as survival politics (Buzan et al., 1998). Shah (2025) argues that the IWT suspension was framed as a coercive act with devastating humanitarian implications in Pakistan, while simultaneously invoked in India as a demonstration of national strength and punitive resolve. The Pakistani press, by contrast, stressed coercion, fear, and humanitarian vulnerability. The same act was inverted: a symbolic weapon in India, and existential threat in Pakistan (for an understanding of water-related wars, see Swain, 2001).

H3 addresses emotional registers in the kinetic exchange. Political psychology shows that anger mobilizes support for aggressive responses, whereas anxiety is more closely associated with caution (Huddy et al., 2007), while Seaton and Wu (2023) highlight that emotions expressed in political and media discourse more generally sustain the narratives of war. Indian outlets often frame responses through “punishment–legitimation” narratives (Rasool et al., 2021), whereas Pakistani outlets more frequently emphasize mourning, restraint, and victimhood narratives (Wasim et al., 2023). This aligns with strategic narrative theory, where competing stories seek both domestic legitimacy and international persuasion (Miskimmon et al., 2014).

These hypotheses position the Pahalgam crisis as a case of mediatized war. The press constructed divergent realities—accusation versus denial, retaliation versus coercion, legitimation versus victimhood—each narratively coherent yet mutually exclusive. Comparable divergences in geopolitical framing have also been observed in transatlantic coverage of international crises (Awais and Ali, 2026). This study also contributes to scholarship by operationalizing mediatization of war through measurable indices of legitimacy, symbolic escalation, and affective atmospheres.

Literature review

This study is anchored in the mediatization of war framework, which conceptualizes contemporary conflicts as unfolding through media logics that shape how violence, legitimacy, and morality are publicly constructed (Chouliaraki, 2012; Cottle, 2006; Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010). Rather than treating framing theory, securitization theory, strategic narrative theory, or propaganda models as separate and competing frameworks, this study integrates them as complementary mechanisms within a mediatized war perspective. Framing explains how meanings are selected and emphasized in news; securitization captures how issues such as treaties are constructed as existential threats; strategic narratives illuminate how states seek legitimacy across domestic and international audiences; and indexing and propaganda models specify the structural conditions under which media align with elite cues.

Research on the nexus between media and conflict consistently shows that contemporary wars are fought not only on the ground but also in discursive and symbolic arenas. News coverage plays a constitutive role in shaping how wars are perceived, justified, and remembered (Chouliaraki, 2012; Cottle, 2006; Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010). The idea of the mediatization of war stresses that the communicative environment is no longer peripheral but integral to how conflicts unfold. Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2010) describe the “diffused war” in which traditional battle lines blur as media infrastructures, digital platforms, and journalistic routines render local violence instantly global. In this environment, the press does not simply record violence; it actively interprets and refracts it, constructing frames that shape interpretations of blame, threat, and moral boundaries (Kotišová, 2025; Stupart, 2021). Within this perspective, media are not peripheral observers but central arenas where blame, threat, and legitimacy are narratively produced during crises.

Classic scholarship already hinted at this dynamic. Knightley (2004)’s history of war correspondents highlighted that patriotic bias has long undermined objective reporting, making truth “the first casualty of war.” Similarly, Allan and Zelizer (2004) argue that the conventions of crisis reporting privilege dramatic spectacle, while Thussu and Freedman (2003) highlight the growing alignment of news with state security paradigms. This bias is often explained through the indexing model (Bennett, 1990; Knight, 2020), which suggests that when political elites are unified, media tend to mirror their positions. Robinson (2000)’s “policy–media interaction model” builds on this, emphasizing feedback loops between media narratives and elite decision-making. The propaganda model by Herman and Chomsky (2008) provides a structural explanation: systemic constraints, ownership patterns, and political pressures make media more likely to “manufacture consent” for official perspectives. Yet scholars have shown that this alignment has personal costs for reporters, who must manage emotional labor and trauma while working under patriotic pressure (Knight, 2020). In protracted rivalries such as India and Pakistan, these press–state dynamics condition how mediatized war unfolds, making elite accusations and threat narratives especially likely to dominate early crisis coverage.

These dynamics are especially visible in the India and Pakistan rivalry, where unresolved disputes and entrenched animosities infuse media systems with nationalist imperatives. Recent comparative studies similarly show that Indian and Pakistani media construct sharply divergent narratives even around shared regional concerns (Awais and Farouk, 2026). Such systems are often caught in “narrow nationalism,” in which patriotism constrains journalistic practice (Bose, 2011). Media amplify divergent emotional discourses (Seaton and Wu, 2023), while states deploy victimhood claims to reinforce legitimacy and undermine adversaries (Markiewicz and Sharvit, 2021). Together, these patterns reflect Wolfsfeld’s (2004) “dual narrative,” in which rival societies sustain parallel but incompatible stories of conflict.

Empirical studies of South Asian crises reinforce these patterns. Rasool et al. (2021) show that Indian newspapers adopt war journalism frames of blame and retaliation, while Pakistan’s DAWN emphasizes denial, dialogue, and investigation, a pattern confirmed by Wasim, Ahmed and Habib (2023)’s CDA of Pulwama coverage. These findings align with Galtung’s (2003) distinction between war and peace journalism, and with evidence from more recent Pahalgam coverage (Arif et al., 2025). In the South Asian context, such framing functions as a “weapon of war,” legitimating one’s own government and delegitimating the adversary (Bose, 2011).

A recurrent theme in this literature is the centrality of accusation and denial. From a mediatization perspective, framing constitutes the micro-level mechanism through which media logics translate events into moral narratives of blame, responsibility, and legitimacy. Entman (1993)’s idea shows that framing involves defining problems, attributing causality, and suggesting remedies. In conflicts, accusation becomes a powerful framing device: allocating blame to an adversary both rallies domestic audiences and justifies retaliation internationally. According to Wæver (1995), securitization is a kind of speech act: by framing a claim as an existential threat, actors bypass normal political procedures and justify extraordinary measures—effectively creating a casus belli without needing full empirical proof. More broadly, scholarship shows that, in times of crisis, media often foreground accusations against adversaries while minimizing counter-evidence (Seaton and Wu, 2023). This corresponds to what Cottle (2006) discusses as media politics of outrage, whereby accusation itself becomes a marker of legitimacy. But conflict narratives also weigh on journalists themselves, whose professional ethics and mental health are entangled with such narratives (Mohammed, 2025).

Pakistani media, conversely, have historically centered denial and calls for evidence. Bose (2011) documents how, during the Kargil war, Pakistani outlets denied direct army involvement. Recent studies note similar patterns in Pulwama coverage, where Pakistani outlets emphasized dossiers, investigations, and independent proof (Rasool et al., 2021; Wasim et al., 2023). Rasool et al. (2021) discuss this strategy in relation to broader communicative practices of victimhood and national positioning. By stressing proof and due process, Pakistani outlets attempt to seize the high ground of rationality and legality, portraying Indian accusations as hasty or politically opportunistic. This asymmetry is precisely what H1 in this study formalizes: Indian media emphasize accusation, while Pakistani media stress denial and proof.

This indicates that mediatized war provides an integrative lens for understanding contemporary crises. Structural alignment with elites conditions coverage, framing organizes blame and denial, securitization elevates policy instruments into symbolic weapons, and strategic narratives and emotions sustain legitimacy across audiences. This integrated perspective guides the analysis of the Pahalgam crisis and motivates the three hypotheses below.

H1: Following the Pahalgam attack and during the subsequent build-up, Indian press emphasizes accusation more than evidence, whereas Pakistani press emphasizes denial and calls for proof.

Beyond accusations, treaties and diplomatic instruments also become sites of mediatization. Securitization is treated here as a specific discursive modality within mediatized war, through which technical instruments such as treaties are narratively transformed into symbols of existential threat and coercion. The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) is often celebrated as one of the most durable water-sharing agreements, yet during crises it becomes symbolically charged. Suspending the treaty transforms a technical mechanism into a securitized act of coercion. Buzan et al. (1998) define securitization as the framing of an issue as existential, justifying extraordinary measures. Indian discourse coverage of the IWT reflects such framing. Shah (2025) argues that suspension of the treaty was framed as a coercive geopolitical strike, symbolically framing water as a geopolitical instrument of strength. This resonates with Swain’s (2001) observation that while “water wars” are often exaggerated, water is frequently politicized within diplomatic conflict narratives (Kaur and Arora, 2025).

Pakistani media portray the IWT differently. Shah (2025) emphasizes that suspending the Indus Waters Treaty is framed in Pakistan as a major security threat, with severe humanitarian and agricultural consequences. Stories emphasize potential drought, famine, and coercion, portraying India’s suspension as illegitimate and coercive aggression. Such framings echo Rasool et al. (2021), who show that Pakistani and Indian media adopted contrasting war and peace journalism frames during the Pulwama crisis. Thus, H2 builds directly on this literature, predicting that Indian media framed the IWT suspension as justified retaliation, while Pakistani media emphasized coercion and insecurity.

H2: Reports about the Indus Waters Treaty suspension are framed affectively, functioning as a symbolic threat: the Indian press justifies retaliation, while the Pakistani press emphasizes coercion and insecurity.

The role of emotion in war reporting has also become central to recent scholarship. Within mediatized war, emotions function as strategic narrative resources that bind audiences to stories of punishment, restraint, victimhood, and moral legitimacy. Chouliaraki (2012) emphasizes that humanitarian communication and mediated representations of conflict are deeply affective, while Seaton and Wu (2023) show how emotions in speeches and media coverage help structure conflict narratives. Political psychology supports this: Huddy et al. (2007) demonstrate that anger increases support for aggressive action, while anxiety or fear are more closely associated with caution. Entman (2004) adds that frames cascade from elites to media to publics, shaping consent for policy actions.

Indian media frequently mobilize anger and pride during crises. Seaton and Wu (2023) show how news outlets amplify emotional discourse in conflict contexts, linking punitive narratives with expressions of national pride—what this study conceptualizes as “punishment-legitimation.” Pakistani coverage, by contrast, foregrounds fear, sadness, and moral restraint. Research on conflict narratives emphasizes that victimhood can be strategically constructed to gain moral high ground and international sympathy. For instance, Noor et al. (2012) demonstrate that groups engaged in protracted conflicts often deploy “competitive victimhood” to shape legitimacy, while Bar-Tal (2007) identifies how collective emotions such as fear and empathy are cultivated to sustain ingroup solidarity. Applying this logic to the Pakistani case, newspapers highlight civilian suffering and humanitarian norms, constructing a “victim–moral” narrative. Even retaliatory actions are framed as reluctant necessities rather than triumphs. This bifurcation corresponds with broader work on strategic narratives (Miskimmon et al., 2014), in which adversaries present themselves as both justified and aggrieved. H3 formalizes this expectation: Indian media fuse anger and pride, while Pakistani media stress fear and victimhood.

H3: During the 7 to 10 May kinetic exchange, the Indian press fuses pride and anger to legitimize its strikes, while the Pakistani press fuses fear and victimhood to narrate its counter strikes.

The broader implications of these findings situate Indo-Pakistani crises within global patterns of mediatized conflict. Wolfsfeld (2004) shows that media narratives are central to peace and war trajectories, while Lynch and McGoldrick (2005) stress the transformative potential of peace journalism. Yet the literature on South Asia demonstrates that structural asymmetries, nationalist imperatives, and securitization pressures often overwhelm such alternatives. In crises, Indian and Pakistani media systematically construct parallel narratives that reinforce antagonisms rather than resolve them.

Methodology

Data collection and corpus construction: This study employed a computational textual analysis integrating systematic news retrieval, lexical processing, and statistical hypothesis testing, an approach increasingly common in media and communication research (Boumans and Trilling, 2018; Grimmer et al., 2022). The design was structured to capture how Indian and Pakistani newspapers discursively mediated the Pahalgam attack (22 April 2025), subsequent escalations, and the ceasefire announcement on 10 May 2025. This study is positioned as a computational frame analysis informed by discourse theory. The analysis operationalizes theoretically derived frames and affective registers through dictionary-based and lexicon-based measures (custom accusation/denial dictionaries and Empath categories), allowing large N, hypothesis-driven testing of discursive patterns (Entman, 1993; Grimmer et al., 2022). While not a qualitative critical discourse analysis, the interpretation of results is guided by a discourse-analytic sensibility that treats language as constitutive of legitimacy, threat, and moral positioning in conflict contexts.

News articles were retrieved from Nexis Uni, a global news archive widely used in media and political communication studies, which allows Boolean searching across headlines and lead paragraphs (Nexis Uni, nd). The query used was:

HLEAD(pahalgam OR “Sindoor” OR “Marsoos” OR kashmir)¹

This expression captured headlines and leads mentioning the Pahalgam attack or related terms. The corpus² was refined through filters to include only English-language newspapers, restricted to the subject area International Relations & National Security and the topical subdomain War & Conflict.³ The temporal window was set between 21 April 2025 and 10 May 2025, covering one day prior to the attack through the period of escalation and eventual ceasefire.⁴ The dataset was exported in tabular form and parsed into an Excel sheet using a python script. Duplicate articles were removed, and the final yield comprised 5972 unique news items. This corpus comprised 5,014 articles from Indian outlets and 958 from Pakistani outlets, as summarized in Table 2.

Lexical feature extraction and preprocessing: The second stage of analysis involved lexical feature extraction. All operations were conducted in Python language environment. After importing the dataset, texts were cleaned through tokenization, lowercasing, and removal of stopwords using the NLTK stopword list (Bird et al., 2009). Non-alphabetic characters were stripped through regular expressions, a standard preprocessing step in text mining (Silge and Robinson, 2017). Each article was thus converted into a normalized string of tokens. The cleaned dataset was then processed using the Empath lexicon (Fast et al., 2016), which provides over 200 semantic categories validated for large-scale text analysis. For each article, Empath produced normalized category frequencies, yielding a document–feature matrix. This enriched dataset was appended to the original metadata, a practice similar to dictionary-based content analysis workflows (Pennebaker et al., 2001).

Operationalization of hypotheses and dictionaries: Alongside Empath categories, custom regex-based term dictionaries were constructed for hypothesis testing, a method consistent with prior studies of conflict framing and narrative analysis (Entman, 1993; Van Gorp, 2010). For H1, regular expressions captured three sets of terms: accusations (e.g., accuse, blame, proxy, safe haven), evidence (e.g., proof, dossier, investigation), and denials (e.g., deny, reject, refute, false flag). The index for accusation emphasis was operationalized as:

Accusation Minus Evidence = Accusation Count - Evidence Count

For H2, treaty-related stories were flagged by searching for terms including Indus, IWT, barrage, Kishanganga, Ratle. Within this subset, composite indices were constructed from Empath categories. The Fear Index aggregated categories such as fear, nervousness, horror, suffering, while the Pride Index aggregated pride, achievement, independence, power, following affective framing approaches used conflict communication research (Åhäll and Gregory, 2015; Fast et al., 2016). Seaton and Wu (2023) further highlight that emotions articulated in media and political speech are not incidental but structure how conflicts are narrated. This dual grounding justifies the construction of affective indices:

Fear Index =_{i \in F}^{x} x_{i}, Pride Index =_{i \in P}^{x} x_{i},

For H3, two further composite indices were derived to capture affective fusion during the kinetic exchange. The Punishment-Legitimation Index combined anger and pride categories, while the Victim-Moral Index combined fear and sadness categories. Such emotional composites align with political psychology research linking anger to support for aggression, and fear or anxiety to perceptions of vulnerability (Brader, 2006; Huddy et al., 2007):

\begin{matrix} Punishment Legit = Anger Index + Pride Index, Victim Moral \\ = Fear Index + Sadness Index \end{matrix}

Table 1 summarizes the mapping between hypotheses and lexical resources.

Table 1.

Lexicon sources used for hypothesis testing.

Hypothesis	Custom Regex dictionaries	Empath-derived categories
H1: Accusation as mediatized legitimacy	Accusation (accuse, blame, sponsor, back, proxy, cross-border, safe haven, terror link, involvement), Evidence (evidence, proof, prove, dossier, forensic, investigate, inquiry, verification, verify, footage, chain of custody, neutral probe), Denial (deny, reject, refute, false flag)
H2: Treaties as mediatized weapons	Treaty terms (Indus, IWT, Treaty, Abeyance, River, Barrage, Canal, Kishanganga, Ratle)	Fear (fear, nervousness, horror, suffering); Pride (pride, achievement, independence, power)
H3: Affective fusion in kinetic exchange		Punishment-Legitimation =Anger+ Pride; Victim-Moral=Fear+Sadness

Note. The custom regex dictionaries were developed through manual inspection of randomly selected news articles published during the incident in both India and Pakistan.

Statistical testing and phase design: The final stage involved statistical testing. Dates were cleaned to remove weekday labels and parsed into standardized formats to maintain consistency across the event driven corpus (Monroe et al., 2008). The analytical window was restricted to 22 April–10 May 2025, with stories segmented into three phases: A (Attack Day, 22 April), B (Buildup and Treaty debates, 23 April–6 May), and C (Kinetic Exchange, 7–10 May). Accordingly, H1 was tested on phases A and B (22 April–6 May), H2 was restricted to treaty-related stories within this window, and H3 was tested exclusively on phase C (7–10 May). Country labels were normalized to “India” and “Pakistan.” Hypothesis tests were implemented as Welch’s independent-sample t-tests, a robust method recommended for unequal variances in media and political science research (Ruxton, 2006). Effect sizes were reported as Cohen’s d, a standard practice for quantifying substantive differences (Lakens, 2013):

t = \frac{\bar{x_{1}} - \bar{x_{2}}}{\sqrt{\frac{s_{1}^{2}}{n_{1}} + \frac{s_{2}^{2}}{n_{2}}}}

where ${\bar{x}}_{i}$ , s², and n_i denote the sample mean, variance, and size for group i.

d = \frac{\bar{x_{1}} - \bar{x_{2}}}{s_{p}}, s_{p} = \sqrt{\frac{(n_{1} - 1) s_{1}^{2} + (n_{2} - 1) s_{2}^{2}}{n_{1} + n_{2} - 2}}

Results and analysis

The dataset compiled through Nexis Uni yielded a total of 5,972 news articles spanning Indian and Pakistani newspapers between 21 April and 10 May 2025. Of these, 5,014 articles were from Indian outlets and 958 from Pakistani outlets, reflecting a structural imbalance in press output that mirrors wider asymmetries in media capacity. Table 2 reports the distribution of stories across escalation phases. The day of the Pahalgam attack generated 59 articles, the subsequent treaty buildup produced 3,321, and the kinetic exchange phase (extended to include 7–10 May, encompassing the ceasefire announcement) yielded 2,592. This phase distribution is critical: the overwhelming share of news coverage clustered in the buildup and kinetic phases, which represent periods of discursive contestation. Although raw counts demonstrate India’s numerical dominance, the analysis below moves beyond volume to consider how lexical and affective choices shaped mediatized atmospheres of legitimacy, threat, and victimhood.

Table 2.

Distribution of news stories by phase and country.

Phase	India	Pakistan	Total
A. Pahalgam incident day (22 April)	55	4	59
B. Buildup and treaty (23 April–6 May)	2,617	704	3,321
C. Kinetic exchange (7–10 May)	2,342	250	2,592
Total	5,014	958	5,972

Before turning to formal hypothesis testing, it is useful to visualize the dominant lexical patterns in each phase, as this sets the stage for understanding subsequent affective and statistical findings. To avoid trivial frequency spikes, generic country names (India, Pakistan) and the search terms used in Nexis Uni queries (e.g., Pahalgam, Sindoor, Marsoos) were excluded from the word counts. Figure 1 plots the top words in Indian and Pakistani coverage for the attack day, the treaty build-up, and the kinetic exchange. These distributions reveal clear contrasts in national discourses. On the attack day, Indian reporting clustered around terms such as attack, tourists, and security, while Pakistani coverage foregrounded political and human rights registers (political, people, rights, media). During the treaty build-up, Indian coverage sustained a strong focus on attack, terror, and military/security vocabulary, whereas Pakistani coverage mixed treaty-specific references (treaty, Indus, water) with broader geopolitical framings (international, peace, war). The kinetic exchange phase again displayed divergence: the Indian press emphasized operational and military vocabulary (operation, forces, strikes, terrorist), while Pakistani coverage highlighted military, international, and response. These descriptive patterns confirm that the two national presses staged the crisis through distinct lexical repertoires, embedding the same sequence of events in different semantic fields.

Figure 1.

Top word frequencies in Indian and Pakistani coverage across phases.

The visual evidence highlights the importance of moving beyond raw counts to lexical indices. Even where the same terms appear (e.g., attack, military), their surrounding contexts differ: in the Indian press they serve to anchor accusations and legitimation, while in the Pakistani press they often appear alongside internationalization and calls for restraint. With this descriptive backdrop, the following sections report hypothesis-specific analyses that quantify these differences in accusation, denial, affective framing, and moral positioning.

H1: Accusation as mediatized legitimacy

The first hypothesis predicted that during the attack and buildup phases, Indian coverage would emphasize accusations more than evidence, whereas Pakistani coverage would stress denial and demands for proof. Table 3 combines descriptives and inferential tests. Indian coverage showed a positive mean on the AccusationMinusEvidence index (M = 0.37), indicating that accusatory terms outnumbered references to evidence. In contrast, Pakistani coverage yielded a negative mean (M = −0.29), meaning that stories referred to evidence more than accusations. For denial counts, Indian outlets averaged only 0.15 denials per story, while Pakistani outlets averaged nearly one (M = 0.94). Welch’s t-tests confirmed these differences as highly significant (p < .001), with medium-to-large effect sizes. These findings directly support H1.

Table 3.

Descriptive and inferential results for H1 (Attack + Buildup phases).

Index	Country	Mean	SD	Min	Max	N	t	p	Cohen’s d
Accusation Minus Evidence	India	0.367	1.444	−7	12	2,672	7.91	<.001	0.41
	Pakistan	−0.290	2.078	−9	9	708
Denial Count	India	0.147	0.503	0	12	2,672	−16.75	<.001	−1.10
	Pakistan	0.942	1.235	0	14	708

H2: Treaties as mediatized weapons

The second hypothesis assessed affective framing in stories about the Indus Waters Treaty. It was expected that the Indian press would frame treaty suspension as a symbolic weapon of retaliation, while Pakistani press would highlight coercion and insecurity. Table 4 shows descriptives and inferential results. The mean fear index was twice as high in Indian coverage (M = 0.065) as in Pakistani coverage (M = 0.032). Pride-related terms were nearly identical across countries, with means of 0.033 (India) and 0.034 (Pakistan). Welch’s t-test showed a strong difference for fear (t = 22.83, p < .001, d = 0.86), but not for pride (t = −1.15, p = .25). This confirms H2 in part: the treaty was discursively weaponized by Indian outlets through affective fear terms, while Pakistani coverage reflected insecurity but not heightened affective escalation.

Table 4.

Descriptive and inferential results for H2 (Treaty stories only).

Index	Country	Mean	SD	Max	N	t	p	Cohen’s d
Fear Index	India	0.065	0.042	0.227	1,667	22.83	<.001	0.86
	Pakistan	0.032	0.022	0.179	472
Pride Index	India	0.033	0.021	0.187	1,667	−1.15	.252	−0.06
	Pakistan	0.034	0.018	0.121	472

H3: Affective fusion in kinetic exchange

The third hypothesis focused on the kinetic exchange phase (7–10 May), predicting that Indian coverage would fuse anger and pride to legitimate strikes, while Pakistani coverage would emphasize fear and sadness to frame victimhood. Table 5 presents descriptives and inferential results. Empirical findings reveal an inversion: Pakistani newspapers displayed higher punishment-legitimation scores (M = 0.114) than Indian newspapers (M = 0.082). Conversely, Indian outlets displayed higher victim-moral scores (M = 0.102) than Pakistani outlets (M = 0.066). These differences were statistically significant: punishment legitimation was greater in the Pakistani press (t = −11.41, p < .001, d = −0.80), while victimhood was greater in the Indian press (t = 11.38, p < .001, d = 0.52). This inversion challenges expectations, suggesting that mediatized atmospheres of war can invert battlefield roles for purposes of domestic legitimacy and international signaling.

Table 5.

Descriptive and inferential results for H3 (kinetic exchange phase).

Index	Country	Mean	SD	Min	Max	N	t	p	Cohen’s d
Punishment-Legit Index	India	0.082	0.040	0.000	0.290	2,342	−11.41	<.001	−0.80
	Pakistan	0.114	0.043	0.026	0.246	250
Victim-Moral Index	India	0.102	0.072	0.000	0.514	2,342	11.38	<.001	0.52
	Pakistan	0.066	0.044	0.005	0.281	250

The descriptive and inferential results reveal three core dynamics. First, during the attack and build-up phases, Indian outlets emphasized accusation while Pakistani outlets emphasized denial and calls for proof, confirming H1. Second, treaty coverage reveals affective weaponization: Indian outlets invoked more fear-related language, while Pakistani coverage remained less affectively escalated, partially confirming H2. Third, the kinetic exchange phase demonstrates a striking inversion: Pakistani outlets emphasized punishment legitimation, while Indian outlets stressed victimhood. Importantly, although lexical indices may appear numerically small (e.g., M = 0.065 for fear), these represent normalized proportions of discourse—dozens of words per thousand tokens—making them discursively significant. The results substantiate the claim that press coverage during this period constituted a discursive battlefield where legitimacy, treaty weaponization, and affective inversions were strategically mediatized.

Discussion

This study set out to examine how Indian and Pakistani newspapers constructed legitimacy, threat, and moral positioning around the April–May 2025 Pahalgam crisis. The patterns that emerged across accusation/denial (H1), treaty securitization (H2), and affective fusion during kinetic exchange (H3) align closely with—and extend—core propositions in the mediatization-of-war tradition. Contemporary conflicts unfold as “diffused wars,” where media infrastructures and journalistic routines make combat simultaneously local and global; in such environments, news does not merely reflect events but actively shapes the moral grammar through which violence is understood (Chouliaraki, 2012; Cottle, 2006; Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010). The present findings show that this moral grammar is not incidental language around policy; it is constitutive of policy legitimation itself, especially during fast-moving crises.

First, H1’s divergence—accusation-forward narratives in Indian coverage versus denial/proof-seeking in Pakistani coverage—speaks to long-observed dynamics in news–state relations. When elites coalesce, mainstream reporting tends to “index” to official cues, amplifying government frames and narrowing discursive space for contestation (Bennett, 1990). At the same time, structural constraints and routines can privilege official perspectives and normalize punitive policy responses, consistent with the “manufacturing consent” critique (Herman and Chomsky, 2008). The Indian press’s rapid foregrounding of accusations after the trigger event fits these mechanisms: accusations operate as a performative shortcut to legitimacy, inviting audiences to accept retaliatory measures as warranted before evidentiary processes conclude. Pakistani denial/proof frames, by contrast, re-center verification and due process, casting India’s claims as precipitous and strategically self-serving. The upshot is a predictable but powerful bifurcation: accusation makes policy appear necessary; denial makes policy appear reckless—two mutually reinforcing narrative positions that mediate public judgment before formal fact-finding can catch up.

Second, H2’s affective treatment of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) illustrates the securitization of technical instruments in mediatized crises. Securitization occurs when political actors successfully frame an issue as existential, authorizing exceptional measures (Buzan et al., 1998). In Indian reporting, the treaty appeared as a symbolic lever—a non-kinetic “strike” that communicates resolve and imposes reputational costs on the adversary—accompanied by emotion-laden discourse that binds national pride to punitive strength. By contrast, Pakistani reporting foregrounded vulnerability and coercion, translating treaty abeyance into an embodied threat narrative (water scarcity, livelihoods, humanitarian risk). These mirror-imaged atmospheres are not mere editorial flourishes; they are the mechanism by which audiences are invited to evaluate the morality of escalation. Read through the lens of strategic narratives, treaty discourse functioned as an instrument for telling different “big stories” about the same policy: one of righteous leverage, the other of illegitimate coercion (Miskimmon et al., 2014).

Third, H3’s inversion—heightened punishment-legitimation in Pakistani outlets during the kinetic exchange and stronger victim-moral fusion in Indian outlets—complicates assumptions that emotional roles map neatly onto battlefield roles. Scholarship on emotion and conflict communication shows that anger tends to mobilize support for force, whereas anxiety or fear elevate restraint and moral witnessing (Entman, 2004; Huddy et al., 2007). Yet, in volatile exchanges, news organizations can reassign these affective roles to pursue strategic credibility at home and abroad. For Pakistan, leaning into anger/pride signals capability and resolve to domestic constituencies (and perhaps adversaries), offsetting perceptions of vulnerability. India, despite initiating the post-attack escalation, increasingly leaned into fear and sadness to frame its actions as reluctant and defensive. This discursive turn toward restraint may partly reflect the material costs India incurred, as reports circulated that multiple Indian jets had been shot down during the fighting (Reuters, 2025a). Trump publicly suggested that as many as five jets were downed, while also urging both sides to step back (Reuters, 2025c; Singh, 2025). Modi asserted that India “went against terrorists” and that Pakistan retaliated, a narrative amplified by domestic media (see Singh, 2025). The episode shows how national media echoed governmental framing, with affective registers shifting in response to battlefield losses as well as strategic needs. The key theoretical move is to treat affect as a strategic resource redistributed flexibly across crisis phases, rather than a static reflection of battlefield advantage (Chouliaraki, 2012; Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010).

These contributions refine the mediatization-of-war literature in three ways. First, they specify phase-conditional mediatization: the same outlets shift affective repertoires as the crisis moves from attribution to compellence to exchange. Rather than a single national “style,” the study observes repertoire switching that tracks opportunities for legitimation and international signaling. Second, they foreground instrumental mediatization: technical instruments (treaties) become communicative weapons because news frames translate bureaucratic adjustments into moral drama. Third, they advance atmospheric mediatization: small but consistent lexical proportions create ambient moral climates that cue audiences toward punishment, fear, pride, or sorrow. These climates operate beneath headlines and persist across coverage, shaping how subsequent events are pre-interpreted.

The findings also engage and extend debates about media power. Classic accounts emphasize elite dominance and patriotic rally effects in foreign policy crises (Allan and Zelizer, 2004; Bennett, 1990; Herman and Chomsky, 2008; Thussu and Freedman, 2003). The present results do not contradict these logics; rather, they show how elite-aligned frames are sustained with affective consistency over time, even as the substantive vehicle (accusation, treaty, kinetic strike) changes. In this sense, the “indexing” of frames is not only cognitive (who did what) but emotional (how it should feel). Theoretically, this pushes mediatization beyond message transmission toward emotive structuration: news organizations help structure the emotional affordances available to publics in ways that can lower the threshold for accepting exceptional measures or, alternatively, elevate the salience of vulnerability and restraint (Chouliaraki, 2012; Cottle, 2006).

Normatively, the analysis highlights why peace journalism remains difficult to achieve where rival nationalisms and security paradigms dominate the news ecology. The dual pressures of elite consensus and audience demand for legible moral narratives channel reporting into stabilized grooves of blame or victimhood. Wolfsfeld’s insight that media can open or close “windows of opportunity” for deescalation is pertinent here: repertoires that bind pride to punishment or fear to vulnerability can foreclose alternative policy options, especially when amplified across platforms (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005; Wolfsfeld, 2004). In contexts of enduring rivalry, small lexical differences matter because they set the background temperature—what is called the atmosphere—within which leaders assess domestic permissibility and international optics.

Theoretical implications

The study elaborates a media-centered model of crisis escalation that integrates mediatization, securitization, and strategic-narrative perspectives. It shows (a) how accusation/denial frames are not symmetric rebuttals but rival legitimation scripts; (b) how policy instruments (treaties) are converted into symbolic threats through affective narration; and (c) how affective repertoires are strategically redistributed across phases, sometimes inverting expected “roles.” More broadly, it complements accounts of the mediatization of politics by specifying how conflict coverage reconfigures the boundaries of the sayable and the doable during crises (Couldry and Hepp, 2017; Huddy et al., 2007).

Practical implications

For editors and reporters, three practices follow. First, build verification buffers around accusation-heavy coverage at the onset of crises—explicitly separating state allegation from verified evidence and maintaining a rolling audit trail of claims and substantiation. Second, deploy affect checks in copy flow: headline and lead paragraph and body-text language that repeatedly embed anger/pride or fear/sadness can, over days, harden public expectations and shrink deliberative space. Third, treat coverage of technical instruments (e.g., treaties) as high-stakes securitization beats; assign specialist reporters and require explicit sourcing protocols to avoid drifting into symbolic-war narratives by default (Allan and Zelizer, 2004; Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005). For international intermediaries (IOs, NGOs), the results suggest investing in pre-crisis media lanes: rapid, credible repositories for claims, evidence, and humanitarian impact that journalists can reference when accusation and denial races begin.

Methodological implications

Computational text analysis can recover meaningful shifts in discursive atmospheres at scale, but it must be used with care. Dictionary and lexicon methods (e.g., Empath-style categories) trade granularity for coverage; they benefit from task-specific tuning and triangulation with close reading (Fast et al., 2016). Preprocessing choices (tokenization, stopwording) and normalization decisions (per-token scaling) can attenuate or amplify affective signals; public, versioned code and sensitivity analyses should be standard (Bird et al., 2009; Grimmer and Stewart, 2013). Future work should (a) validate category mappings against human annotation; (b) extend beyond English-language outlets to capture code-switching and regional press; and (c) complement lexicons with supervised classifiers or embedding-based measures to detect irony and strategic ambiguity typical of crisis discourse (Boumans and Trilling, 2018). Finally, because small proportions can have large discursive consequences, the study recommends reporting both normalized frequencies and “words-per-thousand” equivalents to aid interpretability in newsroom and policy settings.

Limitations and future direction

This study has several limitations. First, lexicon-based approaches such as Empath and dictionary methods may overlook irony, negation, and context-specific meanings, and thus capture affective atmospheres rather than fine-grained sentiment (Fast et al., 2016; Grimmer et al., 2022). Second, the corpus is restricted to English-language newspapers indexed in Nexis Uni, which may underrepresent vernacular media and exclude Urdu, Hindi and regional-language discourse central to Pakistani and Indian publics. Third, while dictionary-driven methods enable large-scale comparison, they inevitably abstract away narrative nuance that close qualitative analysis could recover. These constraints should be borne in mind when interpreting the findings, and future work could integrate multilingual corpora and supervised models to address these limitations. Fourth, this study focuses on institutional journalistic discourse and does not analyze social media communication, which plays a growing role in digital information warfare and hybrid conflict. Future research could extend the present framework to platforms such as X, Facebook, or Telegram to examine how elite frames identified in mainstream news are rearticulated, contested, or amplified in networked digital spaces.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the use of artificial intelligence tools in accordance with the policies of the publisher and the journal.⁵

ORCID iD

Muhammad Awais

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Muhammad Awais is affiliated with the University of Sharjah, UAE and the University of Design, Innovation and Technology (UDIT), Spain. His research focuses on computational communication, media framing, digital discourse, and the political and cultural implications of emerging technologies. His recent publications have appeared in journals such as Media, Culture & Society, International Politics, Journalism, Women’s Studies International Forum, Communication & Sport, and Social Science Computer Review.

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