Samachar: Print News Media on Air Pollution in India

Abstract

Air pollution killed 1.67M people in India in 2019. Previous work has shown that accurate public perception can help people identify the health risks of air pollution and act accordingly. News media influence how the public defines a social problem. However, news media analysis on air pollution has been on a small scale and regional. In this work, we gauge print news media response to air pollution in India on a larger scale. We curated a dataset of 17.4K news articles on air pollution from two leading English daily newspapers spanning 11 years. We performed exploratory data analysis and topic modeling to reveal the news media response to air pollution. Our study shows that, although air pollution is a year-long problem in India, the news media limelight on the issue is periodic (temporal bias). News media prefer to focus on the air pollution issue of metropolitan cities rather than the cities which are worst hit by air pollution (geographical bias). Also, the air pollution source contributions discussed in news articles significantly deviate from the scientific studies. Finally, we analyze the challenges raised by our findings and suggest potential solutions as well as the policy implications of our work.