A study of news coverage and democracy in Bangladesh

This paper aims to examine how Bangladesh has become weaker on democracy despite the increasing number of public and private media in Bangladesh. According to the constitution, Bangladesh is a democratic country and though existing a lot of media outlets including 44 television channels in the country, people's participations in the election and political activities in the country are declining. In the other hand. Theoretically, a general assumption is that when the number of media increases, usually democracy becomes stronger. To address the issue, we attempted to analyze media coverage of four important issues and their relation with the state of democracy in Bangladesh. Our findings indicate that Bangladeshi media coverage is in favor of the dominant political and economic groups. Despite some important differences between the United States of America and Bangladesh, particularly in terms of religion and culture, it seems the propaganda model of media performance, suggested by Herman and Chomsky is applicable in Bangladesh. In addition, there are no major differences between the news coverage of different media outlets of Bangladesh.