LAUSR

The Cold War, among other global geopolitical events, configured and reconfigured politics at multiple levels globally. Other mediatised events, such as the September 11 attacks, the subsequent ‘War on Terror’, Islamophobia and economic processes, such as India’s economic liberalisation in the 1990s, created new global geopolitical alliances between regions. Effects of the shifting politics percolated to local and national amalgams of power, which influenced the gaze of the media. The paper, through Critical Discourse Analysis, unravels the geopolitical impact of the reportage on the Gaw Kadal Massacre and the Amarnath Land Row in Kashmir by The New York Times between 1990 and 2010. The study connects the political objectives of the ruling class to those of the media. Contradistinctions in the political nature of reportage that emerge from the text are linked to geopolitical processes, suggesting that important global events shaped the publication’s gaze on the contested space.