The Contemporaneous Coverage of War News: A Study on Liberation War News of Bangladesh

This study is intended to find out the basic nature of war news in the present days’ print media coverage. The focus of the study is to find out the contemporaneous nature and coverage of liberation war news in Bangladesh after almost 50 years of that incident.This study analyzed The Daily Star and Prothom Alo newspaper coverage of the liberation war story of Bangladesh. This study sought to achieve the basic storytelling nature of the liberation war news.The study applied the content analysis method of 124 copies of The Daily Star and Prothom Alo newspapers over a period of the months of March and December in 2018.Newspaper contents have been selected purposively from which the relevant articles were extracted. The findings indicate that the highest focusing news is the soft news type, and the mostly used structure is narrative structure. It also found most of the news subject is on political personalities, and single-column news treatment has been published most. Documentis being used as the source of most of the news. Besides a little portion of findings highlighted the use of picture color, source and the theme, etc. The newspapers are not highlighting the deeds of martyrs and freedom fighters in the present day’s news coverage. Now they are mostly emphasized on the political personalities’ achievement. This study recommends that newspapers should publish more news and editorials on freedom fighters and the coverage should be enhanced. Key Word:News coverage; News nature; War News.