Indian media covers a little of what happens immediate next to the country. However, this is probably not true from the other side of the fence. People in Indian neighborhood countries do accuse Indians of not knowing enough of SAARC nations. I tried to "Google" the truth.
The method I am going to use is quite easy to understand and I'll soon issue a white paper on this. The parameter to measure the affinity (don't say whether it's a friend or a foe) of a nation to another would be measured by something called normalized google affinity index. To go into details, first let me note the assumtions.
The very first assumption is the people don't know because news media don't feed enough news about those countries. The second one is purely with measurement, (one can easily get away with this if he has more time to research) the one major news media reflects the true coverage of national media. For example, we can take Times of India in case of India as the "one major news media" and calculate on that basis. Let's see what we get.
Search Google News on the site timesofindia.com with India in title for last year : 14,700 results
Search Google News on the site timesofindia.com with Bangladesh in title for last year : 128 results
Search Google News on the site timesofindia.com with Pakistan in title for last year : 553 results
Search Google News on the site dawn.com with Pakistan in title for last year : 1,240 results
Search Google News on the site dawn.com with India in title for last year : 456 results
Search Google News on the site thedailystar.net with Bangladesh in title for last year : 96 results
Search Google News on the site thedailystar.net with India in title for last year : 74 results
The number of search results vary depending on news resource we look at. This is because Google doesn't index them at the same rate, neither the resources publish their news items at the same rate. Hence we need to normalize the rate. For any news resource, most of the time the title captures the own country name. Assuming this, let's calculate the normalized media index for countries.
India : Pakistan = 3.76%
India : Bangladesh = 0.88%
Pakistan : India = 36.77%
Bangladesh : India = 77.08%
India gets quite high attention from news media of Pakistan and Bangladesh compared to what Indian media puts these countries to. Is this the end of research? Not at all. Some of the countries might get more attention because some of the events in that country may get international attention. Let's see, how these countries score on an international media. We'll take google news itself as a base.
Search Google News with India in title for last year : 127,000 results
Search Google News with Pakistan in title for last year : 159,000 results
Search Google News with Bangladesh in title for last year : 5,750 results
So, the result is, Pakistan gets higher coverage than India in international media (not amazing at all), but Indian media doesn't pay attention to it. On the other hand, Bangladesh gets low International attention (4.5% of what India gets) and Indian media puts it even lower. Interesting?
Note : The numbers in the Google results are approximate and may vary with time
Interesting article. I wonder how bloggers in other lands might test and apply the knowledge shared here?
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