Pakistan’s news media has grown steadily over the years, and today the country has a large mainstream press alongside a fast-expanding digital presence — blogs, vlogs and podcasts included. According to Data Reportal, Pakistan’s digital footprint keeps climbing: nearly half the population was already online at the start of 2024, with 111.0 million internet users recorded at that point. On paper, that gives news outlets enormous room to cover more, and more specifically.

But that growth hasn’t translated evenly across every subject the press covers. News coverage of religious minorities is one clear gap. Reporting on these communities tends to be biased or thin, partly because minority audiences are small and outlets chasing majority readership have little commercial incentive to invest in the beat, and partly because when minority issues do surface, many newsrooms remain cautious or silent rather than risk a reporting angle that could be seen as taking sides.

Religious minorities in Pakistan — including Christians, Hindus, Ahmadis, Sikhs and others — live with limited human-rights protection relative to community standards, and are underrepresented in the media or covered only in a narrow slice of their actual concerns. This despite forming more than 3% of the national population: per the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics’ 2021 report, the country is 1.27% Christian, 2.14% Hindu, 0.09% Ahmadi Muslim and 0.02% other minority faiths.

Most coverage arrives only when minorities are attacked — a church or temple burned, a mob descending on a neighbourhood. There is little reporting on their education, healthcare, employment conditions, lifestyle or broader human development. Newsrooms themselves lack diversity, with few journalists drawn from minority backgrounds, which feeds a shallower understanding of these communities in coverage decisions. Self-censorship and government censorship further narrow what gets reported on sensitive minority-related topics. This study examines twelve months of that coverage in close detail.

This study uses content analysis, a method well-suited to gathering data and sorting it into tables that reveal relationships between findings. Data was gathered through online research — searching minority-related keywords (Christian, Hindu, Ahmadi, Sikh) and manually reviewing the web links of news outlets.

Two of Pakistan’s most historic newspapers were selected, one English and one Urdu: Dawn, founded by Quaid-e-Azam and among the country’s oldest English-language papers, and Nawai Waqt, an Urdu paper with a storied role in the Pakistan Movement. Both were launched in the 1940s. A full year of coverage was collected and coded for each — recent enough to reflect current newsroom behaviour, and long enough to be analytically sound.