1. U.S. Media Coverage of Human Rights
Week 2_Thursday
U.S. Media Coverage of Human Rights
Lecture by
Jeong-Woo Koo

2. Tiananmen Massacre in 1989
Click for video

3. CNN Effect

4. “the ability to expose human rights violations no matter where in the world they occur”

5. “When American viewers could see troops moving into Tiananmen Square, it became impossible for the Bush administration to avoid a public condemnation of the Chinese government.”
(Friedland 1992)

6. Do you think
media has played an
instrumental role
in raising
public awareness
on human rights?

7. The Function of Media

8. “A representative democracy relies on some degree of public interest to determine the policy agenda, a lack of interest among the mass public almost always translates into a lack of interest by political elites.”
(Caliendo et al. p.48)

9. Yet, public opinion is largely determined by media, which injects attitudes on policy preferences or influences the priorities the public assigns to national problems.

10. How much coverage is enough?
(1) 30 stories a day in a newspaper mentioning HRs
(2) 20 stories a day
(3) 10 stories a day
(4) 2 stories a day

11. What happens if the media covers insufficiently certain issues,
even wrongly inform the public about certain issues?

12. Previous Research Geyer and Shapiro (1988)—
Covered New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, and the CBS Evening News and found that human rights violations received a tremendous boost in media coverage early in the Carter administration, but later waned.
Ovsiovitch (1993, 1996)—
analyzed human rights coverage in the New York Times, Time magazine, and the CBS Evening News for a ten-year period ( ), saw six thousand human rights news stories, but concluded that, overall, there is very little coverage of human rights.

13. Research Strategy in Caliendo et al’s Work (1999)
Instead of examining stories referring to human rights, the authors focus on individual countries in the developing world.
The key question revolves around the question of how the press covers a particular country in its totality (all the stories!!)
Selected countries that received an average PTS score of 3.5 or higher in either 1985 or 1995 (comparison of the cold war and post-cold war era).
Analyzed the New York Times to serve as a baseline

14. Key Findings
Unlike usual expectations that “the higher the level of political terror, the greater the amount of press coverage, and the greater the number of stories related to human rights (p. 59)”, the authors found that
There are too many countries experiencing extraordinary high levels of political violence that receive little to no attention from the New York Times.
There is a sharp decline (comparing 1985 and 1995) in press coverage of countries experiencing gross levels of human rights abuses.

15. Information Paradox
Enhancing the availability and accuracy of information regarding human rights practices can exacerbate or even exaggerate perceptions of abuse …
(Cole 2010: 304)

16. PTS
Range of
Total
Stores
Mean No.
of Total Stories
HRs
Stories
of HRs
1985
5(5)
5-151
90.2
4-93
57.4
4.5(6)
26-584
146.3
7-276
71.5
4(7)
16-452
163.3
5-200
62.4
3.5(12)
0-230
54.2
0-109
25.9
1995
5(6)
16-163
76.0
10-68
38.7
4.5(11)
10-102
52.6
5-59
26.0
4(12)
1-365
55.6
0-49
15.1
3.5(13)
0-126
21.2
0-25
4.6

17. Evidence
•Significant differences among countries, which received the PTS score of “5”, in terms of their press coverage (e.g., 5 stores for Chad, and 151 stories for Iran).
•The range for level 4 countries was from 1 (Chad) to 365 (Mexico)
•The extreme case of Chad: Despite widespread atrocities in 1985, the NYT published only five stories on Chad in all of 1985….in 1995 when Chad was still plagued with high levels of terror, the NYT published only one story related to Chad.
•Brazil had a PTS score of 3.5, but none of the 92 stories run by the NYT related to human rights.

18. Is no news good news?

19. South Korean Media Coverage
Number of Articles with Titles of “Human Rights”
EPS
NHRCK
HR in NK

20. South Korean Media Coverage
Number of Articles with Titles of “Human Rights” up to 2015