My research lies at the intersection of journalism studies, media sociology, and political communication, with a particular focus on the structural, institutional, and individual forces that shape journalism’s capacity to fulfill its public-service and epistemic functions. I am especially interested in how journalism is shaped by broader sociopolitical fields and how organizational structures, political and economic pressures, professional norms, and the ideological orientations of journalists influence news production, framing, and representation. Across my research, I seek to understand why journalism often falls short of its normative commitments and how institutional and individual agency can either constrain or strengthen journalistic integrity.
My 15 yearlong journalistic career as well as academic training in media sociology have strengthened my believe that journalism is a quasi-judicial job aimed to serve the public interest. As a strong advocate of public-service journalism, my scholarship, like my professional practice, examines how journalism can serve the public interest, particularly by representing underserved and marginalized voices and contributing to democratic governance. A central emerging component of my research agenda is the development of Integrity Journalism, a normative framework that I propose as a way of rethinking the traditional ideal of objective journalism in increasingly polarized, fragmented, and technologically mediated media environments. I argue that journalism’s normative foundation should extend beyond procedural notions of objectivity and incorporate truth-seeking, evidence, transparency, ethical judgment, accountability, and commitment to the public interest. This inquiry is grounded in my broader interest in understanding how political, regulatory, organizational, cultural, and technological conditions shape journalistic practice across different societies.
My research agenda is grounded in methodological and epistemological pluralism. I draw on positivist, post-positivist and other social-scientific and interpretive traditions and employ qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method approaches according to the questions under investigation. My methodological repertoire includes framing analysis, textual and discourse analysis, in-depth interviews, ethnography and internet ethnography, surveys, and quantitative content analysis. I analyze diverse forms of evidence, including news articles, social media content, public opinion data, interviews, and government and institutional documents. My interdisciplinary training in journalism and mass communication, communication studies, sociology, and political science enables me to approach media phenomena through multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives while remaining attentive to global and cross-cultural contexts.
My research addresses several interconnected areas, including media power, media capture, journalistic self-censorship, media representation, framing variance, the digital public sphere, disinformation, and journalism’s public-service role. My Ph.D. dissertation, “A Single-Society Influences Model (SSIM) for Explaining Variance in News Framing and Discourse: Evidence from Bangladesh,” reconceptualizes Shoemaker and Reese’s Hierarchy of Influences Model (HIM) to explain why media organizations operating within the same national media system may produce substantially different representations of the same events. I developed the Single Society Influences Model (SSIM) to argue that variance in news framing and discourse within a single society can be understood through the dynamic, dialectical, and asymmetrical interaction between positive organizational journalistic agency and positive individual journalistic agency. The model therefore provides a more focused framework for examining how institutional structures and individual agency interact to produce variation in journalism within a shared sociopolitical environment.
SSIM represents an effort to move beyond simply identifying levels of influence on journalism toward explaining why those influences produce different journalistic outcomes within the same society. My dissertation provides empirical evidence from Bangladesh to demonstrate how organizational policies, ownership interests, political alignments, professional norms, and individual journalistic orientations interact in shaping news framing. The theoretical contribution was recognized with the second-best theory paper award at the 2025 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference in San Francisco. My current work extends SSIM by exploring its applicability across different media systems and by examining how organizational and individual agency operate under conditions of political polarization, media capture, and technological disruption.
My earlier research examined self-censorship in journalism in Bangladesh. My master’s thesis investigated the factors that influence journalists’ decisions to censor themselves and subsequently developed into a published article in the News Research Journal. This work introduced the concept of Private Self-censorship to distinguish internally motivated forms of journalistic restraint from self-censorship resulting primarily from external coercion. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative freedom and the self-censorship model developed by economists Philip Cook and Conrad Heilmann, I examine how journalists’ own beliefs, motivations, professional identities, and perceptions of responsibility can shape what they choose not to report, even in the absence of direct institutional coercion. This research complements SSIM by extending my examination of journalistic agency from organizational structures to the internal processes through which journalists interpret and negotiate professional constraints.
My future research will build on these interconnected strands through three broad directions. First, I plan to test and extend SSIM through comparative and cross-national research, examining whether the relationship between positive organizational and individual journalistic agency explains framing variance across different political and media systems. Such research will allow me to assess the model’s theoretical scope beyond the Bangladeshi case while identifying how political institutions, ownership structures, professional cultures, and media markets condition journalistic agency. Second, I will extend my work on media capture and self-censorship by examining how political and economic pressures interact with journalists’ perceptions, motivations, and professional identities to influence news selection, framing, and omission. This research will incorporate comparative interviews, content analysis, and digital-media data to examine both institutional and individual dimensions of journalistic constraint.
Third, I will further develop the concept of Integrity Journalism as a normative framework for contemporary journalism. This work will examine whether truth-seeking, transparency, accountability, ethical judgment, and public-service commitments can provide a more comprehensive normative foundation for journalism than objectivity alone. I am particularly interested in examining how Integrity Journalism can respond to the challenges posed by polarization, disinformation, platformization, declining trust, and generative artificial intelligence. Together, these projects will allow me to connect empirical research on how journalism actually operates with normative inquiry into how journalism ought to function in democratic societies.
My methodological training provides a strong foundation for this research agenda. I completed seven graduate-level courses in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method research across Communication, Political Science, and Sociology, including JTC 664 Quantitative Research in Communication, POLS 627 Quantitative Methods of Political Research II, JTC 665 Qualitative Methods in Communication Research, SOC 510 Sociological Methods I, SOC 511 Sociological Methods II, JAMS 700 Approaches to Media Studies (Qual), and JAMS 701 Media Studies Research Design (Quan). This training has equipped me to design and execute research using multiple methodological approaches and to select methods based on the theoretical and empirical demands of a research question. As a new faculty member, I am committed to developing an independent research program, pursuing interdisciplinary collaborations, publishing in leading journals, presenting at national and international conferences, and seeking external funding to support comparative research on journalism, media systems, and political communication.
Across these areas, my overarching goal is to develop a sustained research program that explains how journalism is shaped, constrained, and transformed—and how it can better fulfill its epistemic, ethical, and public-service functions. By bringing together media sociology, political communication, journalism studies, and normative theory, I seek to contribute scholarship that is theoretically innovative, empirically grounded, methodologically rigorous, and relevant to journalism’s role in democratic life.