Representation of Ethnic Minorities in Media: Comparative Analysis Between Pakistan's Shark Tank and the UK's Dragon's Den | RISE Research

This paper offers a comparative analysis of how ethnic minorities are represented and included on entrepreneurship-focused media platforms, contrasting Shark Tank Pakistan with Dragons' Den in the UK. Using a mixed comparative design that draws on secondary quantitative data (such as UNDP entrepreneurship surveys, British Business Bank funding statistics, and computational text-analysis findings on terrorism-coverage bias) alongside qualitative framing analysis, the paper argues that exclusion operates through different mechanisms in each country even though the outcome, underrepresentation, looks similar. In Pakistan, minority entrepreneurs, particularly from regions like Balochistan, Chitral, and Mianwali, are excluded primarily through infrastructural barriers: poor road and telecommunications access restricts participation, with roughly 84% of Shark Tank Pakistan entrepreneurs coming from urban, ethnic-majority areas like Lahore and Karachi. In the UK, by contrast, exclusion operates through financial and social bias: ethnic minority businesses make up 18.3% of the population's entrepreneurial base but receive only 8% of investment funding, reflecting discouragement and perceived rejection rather than infrastructure gaps. The paper also connects negative media framing of Muslim communities, drawing on De Coster et al.'s computational analysis of terrorism coverage, to how British Pakistani communities face compounded ethnic and religious marginalization, since Pakistan is itself a Muslim-majority country and its minorities in the UK inherit this dual stigma. The paper concludes that policy solutions must be tailored to each country's distinct barriers, proposing strategies such as institutionalized racial equity audits for UK business funding programs and leveraging Pakistan Post's roughly 13,000-branch rural network to expand financial access for ethnic minority entrepreneurs in underserved regions, while calling for more institutionalized data collection on minority-owned businesses in both countries.