Framing Persistence and Distortion in Post-Conflict News: A Reese-Informed Analysis of Manipur Coverage, 2025

Abstract

This study examines how the 2023 ethnic violence in Manipur has been framed in two highest circulated regional digital news platforms—The Sangai Express and The Frontier Manipur—in post conflict news stories through a qualitative analysis grounded in Stephen D. Reese’s framing model. Focusing on 107 news reports published between January and March 2025, nearly two years after the initial outbreak of violence, the study investigates how frames persist, stabilize, and occasionally break down in a post-conflict media environment. Reese’s six framing characteristics are operationalized through textual indicators including narrative organization, lexical patterns, sourcing practices, and temporal sequencing, enabling a comparative assessment of how each platform constructs and sustains meaning. The findings show a strong dominance of security and political frames across both outlets, but with significant divergence in organizational coherence and narrative persistence. While The Sangai Express exhibits structured and cumulative framing, The Frontier Manipur adopts a more episodic and interventionist approach. Crucially, the study identifies distortion as an emergent outcome of framing processes, arising when persistence, shared meanings, and organizational structures interact under conditions of verification failure Rather than extending Reese’s model formally, the study demonstrates a limitation within it: the absence of a conceptual account of framing breakdowns in conflict reporting. By situating framing within a temporally extended, post-conflict context, this research contributes to debates on media framing, conflict journalism, and information disorder in digital news environments.