Child marriage news coverage in Bangladeshi newspapers to enhance news literacy

Bangladesh has witnessed a dramatic change in media-sphere with a mushrooming growth of media house in a recent decade. The current trend of media monopolization causes media audiences facing more challenges to filter and evaluate the content as well as make informed decisions. However, lack of relevant study in Bangladeshi media context indicates that there is a need for developing news literacy skills that focus language used in media. From this point of view, the study on news literacy has intended to analyses the nature of presenting social issues on a similar media setting to promote and develop critical thinking by identifying multiple aspects of a problem and generate recommendations to upgrade the situation. This case study based content analysis analytically investigates how english and bengali language newspaper in Bangladesh presented the issue of Child Marriage. Finding suggests that both english and bangla language media give less coverage to child marriage issue. Differences are also found between the newspapers to cover the child marriage news, i.e. the statement, tone, frequency, direction, length and source of the report. Some recommendations have been suggested based on the findings to improve the situation. It is hoped that researchers will use this study as a reference to conduct further research as well as enrich the field of news literacy for better understanding