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Media Coverage of Human Rights in the USA and UK: The Violations Still Will Not Be Televised (or Published)

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Abstract

This article analyzes American television and American and British print news coverage of human rights using a combination of manual and machine coding. The data reveal that television and print news cover very few human rights stories, that these stories are mostly international and not domestic, that even when human rights are covered, they are not covered in detail, and that human rights issues are more likely to be covered when they are not framed as human rights. This suggests that human rights is simply not a frame that journalists employ and provides support for government-leading-media theories of newsworthiness.

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Notes

  1. For recent scholarship on social media coverage of human rights-related topics, see Chiluwa and Ifukor’s (2015) tracing of #BringBackOurGirls; Freelon et al. (2016) and Bonilla and Rosa (2015) on #Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter; Devriese (2013), Cattle (2016), and Joseph (2012) on media and social media during the Arab Spring; and Brooten et al. (2015) on print and Facebook group coverage of the Rohingya in Myanmar.

  2. The early high hopes for Obama as a defender of human rights, exemplified by his second day Executive Order to close Guantanamo Bay or his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize during the first year of his presidency, are muddled by his actual record in office. For further details, see Brigitte Nacos and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon’s contribution to this issue on torture and drone usage as well as Roth, Kenneth. “Barack Obama’s Shaky Legacy on Human Rights.” Foreign Policy, January 4, 2017. http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/04/barack-obamas-shaky-legacy-on-human-rights/

  3. The October 17, 2013, story about a 15-year-old boy’s plea for a family to adopt him out of foster care that went viral was discarded because it did not fulfill the search parameters; it included the phrase “human’s right” instead of “human rights.” Even though it is not a human rights story as defined by this methodology, the story merits a brief discussion. The caseworker used something close to human rights language, as opposed to basic right, civil right, or right as an American to describe the desire for family, “I think it’s a human’s right to be loved and wanted. And when you don’t feel that you are, it’s hard to succeed in life.”

  4. Examples of official titles include “Human Rights Watch issued the report, the State’s Office of Human Rights was attacked,” while examples of unofficial titles would include “Kerry Kennedy, human rights activist,” or “pressure from human rights groups.”

  5. Coding sheet available from the author; it is largely duplicative of the methodology and coding sheets used in Brandle (2015).

  6. The Times was selected for analysis because of its status as a high-circulation quality paper, and because the stories were available for research. Of the five quality British papers listed in Kuhn (2007), The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Times, The Times was the top brand for weekly usage of the quality papers (Newman et al. 2017, p. 54) with the highest circulation in 2017 (Ponsford 2017).

  7. There were four days that tied for the highest number of stories containing the phrase human right in the The Times for the first quarter of 2017: January 29, February 5, February 14, and February 25. To break the tie, the day that had the highest number of human rights-containing stories in The New York Times was selected.

  8. Commonly used words (a, and, the, etc.) and words commonly used in news stories, such as anchor’s names and broadcast titles, were excluded from analysis to get a clearer picture of the content of the stories.

  9. The treaties obtained were the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. A category was also added for LGBT rights, although no explicit human rights treaty exists to protect LGBT persons. Treaty texts obtained from http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CoreInstruments.aspx and the categorization keywords are listed in Appendix II of the Online Appendix at https://goo.gl/2e4o1f.

  10. The bar for categorization was lowered by eliminating the requirement that phrases or words with a case frequency of less than 2 be eliminated. It is maintained in all other dictionary categorizations in this article.

  11. See Appendix I of the Online Appendix at https://goo.gl/2e4o1f for the complete list of The New York Times sections for human rights stories from 2010 to 2016.

  12. This is somewhat ironic, as leaving the EU would have no effect on the UK’s obligations as a Council of Europe member for the European Convention on Human Rights or its subjection to the European Court of Human Rights, which is what the HRA incorporated into domestic law; leaving the EU would only allow the UK to no longer be bound by the EU Charter of Fundamental Freedoms and the European Court of Justice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York, New York City, NY, USA

    Shawna M. Brandle

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  1. Shawna M. Brandle
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Correspondence to Shawna M. Brandle.

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Brandle, S.M. Media Coverage of Human Rights in the USA and UK: The Violations Still Will Not Be Televised (or Published). Hum Rights Rev 19, 167–191 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-018-0495-5

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