In 1999, the Project for Excellence in Journalism — working with Jay Rosen at NYU and Princeton Survey Research Associates — produced what remains the most cited content analysis in American journalism studies. “Framing the News” coded 2,269 front-page stories from seven US newspapers, asking a deceptively simple set of questions: What narrative frames do journalists use? What triggers a story into existence? What underlying messages does the news carry?
That study has not previously been replicated for India. This report presents such a replication.
We adapted PEJ’s methodology for Indian digital news in 2026, coding 170 homepage stories from 12 English-language outlets using a constructed week spanning January through May. The outlets: Scroll.in, The Wire, The Print, Newslaundry, FirstPost, NDTV, India Today, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, Times of India, News18, and The Hindu. The coding taxonomy: 14 narrative frames, 16 topic categories, 12 trigger types, and 9 underlying message categories — all adapted from PEJ’s original codebook with one India-specific addition.
The findings depart from the American baseline in several respects.
Straight news framing
Straight news — the who-what-when-where-why inverted pyramid with no dominant narrative frame — accounts for 27.6% of all homepage stories. In PEJ’s American study, that figure was 16%. Taken in aggregate, Indian digital journalism shows a higher share of fact-based framing than PEJ recorded for American newspapers at the turn of the century.
The aggregate, however, conceals a marked divergence between outlet types.
Two populations: legacy digital and digital native
Split the 12 outlets into digital natives (Scroll, Wire, Print, Newslaundry, FirstPost) and legacy-digital operations (NDTV, India Today, HT, Indian Express, TOI, News18, The Hindu), and the numbers diverge sharply. Legacy outlets use straight news framing 37.1% of the time. Digital natives use it 12.3% of the time — a 3:1 ratio.
The divergence appears to reflect editorial philosophy rather than quality: legacy outlets predominantly report what happened, digital natives predominantly interrogate what it means. The Wire frames 27% of its homepage stories around conflict; NDTV frames 67% as straight news. The two groups occupy distinct positions in the framing space.
Combative framing: close to PEJ, differently distributed
PEJ’s most cited finding was that three “combative” frames — conflict, horse race, and wrongdoing exposed — accounted for 30% of all American front-page stories, twice the share of straight news accounts. In India, the equivalent figure is 25.2% (conflict 10.0%, horse race 7.6%, wrongdoing 7.6%). Close — but distributed differently. In the US, combativeness clustered around government reporting. In India, it concentrates in election coverage: when elections are the trigger, horse-race framing rises to 58.3%, making it the modal frame for election stories.
Consensus framing
The largest divergence from the American baseline concerns consensus framing: 1.2% of stories — two out of 170 — are framed around points of agreement. In PEJ’s American study, which itself noted the scarcity of consensus framing, the figure was 6%. The Indian share is one-fifth of an already low baseline.
The sampling window included five simultaneous state elections, a US tariff dispute, a Middle East conflict affecting India’s oil supply, and post-election violence in Bengal. Across that period, consensus-framed coverage was nearly absent from the sampled homepages.
This pattern describes narrative convention in Indian digital journalism, not the availability of agreement in Indian public life. Where stakeholders converge — on policy, on process, on outcomes — that convergence is rarely selected as the organising frame of a story.
The enterprise finding
PEJ found that when American journalists initiated stories through their own enterprise — rather than responding to government statements or breaking events — they defaulted to personality profiles and trend stories. In India, the pattern differs. When Indian digital journalists initiate the story themselves, the dominant frame is wrongdoing exposed (25%). In this sample, enterprise-triggered journalism is predominantly accountability journalism: it investigates the powerful more often than it profiles them.
This is a notable divergence from the American pattern.
Transparency and accountability framing
We extended the PEJ framework with two additional layers drawn from Jay Rosen’s work on journalistic authority and Mark Deuze’s structural typology of online journalism. Each outlet was scored on a “Rosen Transparency Index” — measuring disclosed funding models, corrections policies, editorial stance transparency, and audience relationship.
The association is strong. Newslaundry (Rosen score 10/10, fully reader-funded) devotes 80% of its editorial output to accountability frames. Scroll.in (7/10) runs 40%. The corporate-funded outlets scoring lowest on the index — NDTV, Hindustan Times, Times of India, and FirstPost, coded under Rosen’s “view from nowhere” category in this study’s typology — produced no accountability-framed homepage stories in the sample.
With 12 outlets, this is a descriptive correlation, not a causal claim. But its consistency across the sample points toward structural explanations — funding model and audience relationship — rather than individual editorial disposition, and it warrants testing against a larger sample.
The Hindu: policy journalism’s outlier
One outlet diverges most clearly from the legacy pattern. The Hindu devotes 26.7% of its homepage to policy-explored framing — five times the field average of 5.3%. It is the only legacy outlet to produce a consensus-framed story in the sample. Its historical-outlook framing (13.3%) is nearly triple the field average. In a landscape where legacy digital tends toward straight news and digital natives toward conflict or accountability, The Hindu tends toward explanation: what a policy means, rather than who wins or who is to blame. Whether this reflects the paper’s 148-year editorial tradition, its Chennai base, or its ownership structure is beyond this study’s scope — but the pattern is distinctive and immediately visible in the radar chart.
What the government drives
Government statements and actions trigger 27.1% of all stories — the single largest trigger category, identical to PEJ’s finding a quarter-century ago. The Indian press, like the American press of 1999, remains substantially reactive to the state. Newsroom enterprise is the second-largest trigger at 14.1%, and when enterprise is the trigger, the resulting frame is predominantly accountability-oriented. The capacity for enterprise accountability journalism exists across the field; its deployment correlates with funding model, as described above.
The underlying messages
PEJ found that when American stories carried identifiable underlying messages, optimism was the most common theme (27%). India’s figure is 29.4%. Anti-establishment messages — distrust of systems, belief that institutions are failing — account for 12.9%, but cluster almost entirely in digital-native outlets (24.6% in digital natives against 4.4% in legacy). Legacy Indian news tends to carry optimism; digital-native Indian news tends to carry suspicion. Message valence is strongly associated with outlet type.
Discussion
Three observations for editors and media researchers:
First, the high straight-news share in legacy outlets admits two readings — factual rigour, or risk aversion. Framing data alone cannot distinguish them. The co-occurrence of high straight-news shares with near-zero interpretive and accountability framing in the same outlets suggests the second reading deserves systematic study.
Second, the near-absence of consensus framing has received little professional discussion. A press whose narrative repertoire rarely includes agreement, collaboration, or policy convergence is better equipped to narrate the existence of problems than their resolution. This is a repertoire question, not a partisanship question, and it applies across both outlet populations.
Third, the transparency–accountability association merits attention from corporate-funded newsrooms and from researchers alike: within this sample, framing repertoire tracks funding model. A larger sample, and repeated waves, should test whether the association holds.
Methodology: Constructed week (7 random days, Jan–May 2026), 170 stories, 12 outlets, PEJ-adapted codebook with 14 frames, 16 topics, 12 triggers, 9 message categories. Extended with the Rosen Transparency Index and Deuze structural typology. Limitations: single constructed week, 12 outlets, descriptive statistics only — reported correlations are not causal claims. Quarterly re-runs will track frame shifts against this baseline. Full interactive dashboard, codebook, and coded dataset available.