Making Human Rights News

Balancing Participation and Professionalism

John Pollock, Morton Winston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351711159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Making Human Rights News: Balancing Participation and Professionalism explores the impact of new digital technology and activism on the production of human rights messages. It is the first collection of studies to combine multidisciplinary approaches, "citizen witness" challenges to journalism ethics, and expert assessments of the "liberating role" of the Internet, addressing the following questions:

1. What can scholars from a wide range of disciplines – including communication studies, journalism, sociology, political science, and international relations/studies – add to traditional legal and political human rights discussions, exploring the impact of innovative digital information technologies on the gathering and dissemination of human rights news?

2. What questions about journalism ethics and professionalism arise as growing numbers of untrained "citizen witnesses" use modern mobile technology to document claims of human rights abuses?

3. What are the limits of the "liberating role" of the Internet in challenging traditional sources of authority and credibility, such as professional journalists and human rights professionals?

4. How do greater Internet access and human rights activism interact with variations in press freedom and government censorship worldwide to promote respect for different categories of human rights, such as women's rights and rights to health?

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Human Rights.

A new era of human rights news? Contrasting two paradigms of human rights news-making

Matthew Powers

University of Washington

ABSTRACT

Past research suggests that news coverage of human rights is shaped primarily by interactions between journalists, political elites, and leading NGOs. To what degree do contemporary transformations in media, politics, and civil society alter this established wisdom? In this article, I sketch out the possibility that we are witnessing a new era of human rights news, characterized by the expansion of information producers and social contexts to which human rights frames are ascribed. In this era, leading NGOs and news organizations must increasingly interact with individual activists and others on the selection, framing, and dissemination of human rights news. These developments may remedy some of the weaknesses identified in previous research on human rights news, even as they create new concerns about the veracity and pluralistic nature of human rights news content. I suggest ways to study this new era so as to integrate findings with past research.

Introduction

In 2004, a group of Inuit leaders circulated a petition detailing the ways in which climate change had wrought havoc on their daily lives.¹ Rising temperatures, they said, threatened their food supply, endangered their health and imperiled their capacity to live in the Arctic. Seeking redress, they filed a formal complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, naming the United States—at the time the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases—a violator of the 1948 Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. To boost awareness of their concerns, they participated in the production of a documentary video and circulated information about the issue online. Attention grew steadily. While the Inuit leaders did not initially pursue coverage in the mainstream media, they received it in late 2004, when a number of news outlets, including the New York Times (Revkin 2004), spotlighted the effort to highlight the ways in which communities were increasingly talking about climate change in human rights terms.

The efforts by Inuit leaders to frame climate change in human rights terms differ substantially from the established paradigm of human rights news. For starters, the usual producers and distributors of human rights discourses—nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and news organizations, respectively—were not integral to the original efforts to publicize the issue. Instead, local activists used low-cost digital technologies to raise awareness and to target international governing bodies. Moreover, the discourse of human rights itself departed from human rights stories that emphasize political violations (e.g., torture, abuse, etc.) that occur in the Global South. By reframing climate change as a human rights issue, the Inuit activists sought to alter public perception of the nature of human rights violations and to implicate culprits in the Global North. Together, these developments suggest the possible dawn of a “new era” of human rights news, one that may be less dependent on the mass media and may involve the use of digital technologies to fashion new forms of human rights reporting.

In this article, I explore some of the ways in which a new era of human rights news may be taking shape. To do so, I (a) identify the extant paradigm and highlight its various strengths and weaknesses, (b) discuss how a set of institutional, discursive, and technological changes may usher in a new paradigm, (c) delineate a set of features that characterizes various cases of human rights news-making today and that seem to depart from the established paradigm of human rights news, and (d) suggest some implications of these developments for future research. The argument put forward raises the question of a new era of human rights; it does not aim to settle it. Instead, it draws out some of the contrasts and orients some key questions for scholars interested in the production and circulation of human rights news. To do so, it draws on recently published research, as well as examples from my own work on the changes in the world of human rights reporting.²

Writing about a potential new era of human rights news raises questions about what exactly is meant by the terms “human rights” and “news,” respectively. Drawing on Foucault (1977), I will define human rights as a “discursive formation,” that is, as a way of speaking that exceeds the boundaries of any single usage. Human rights discourses embody multiple ideals (e.g., legal conventions, political rhetoric, social movement activism), which are sometimes in tension. These various ideals generate debates about the “true” meaning of human rights, which differ from legal interpretations that use international laws to define human rights norms. Yet, news coverage of human rights is more flexible than legal prescriptions; the definition used here reflects that need for a capacious approach. Relatedly, I will define “news” as information and/or commentary on contemporary affairs in which one or more actors identify an issue related to human rights (Schudson 2011). In this definition, news may come from news organizations, but it may also come from NGOs, civic groups, or indeed even individuals. Like human rights, news is defined loosely so as to reflect the shifting information environment in which news is produced and circulated today.

The extant paradigm of human rights news

To date, scholarship examining the relationship between media and human rights suggests a news paradigm that is characterized by (a) news organizations serving as the primary vehicle for reaching large audiences (Keck and Sikkink 1998), (b) NGOs that are heavily reliant on those news organizations to raise awareness of human rights issues (Bob 2005; Hopgood 2006), and (c) human rights issues that pertain primarily to violations of political rights (e.g., torture, illegal detention, etc.) that are committed beyond the United States and Western Europe (Clark 2001; Winston 2001). In this paradigm, news media act as key “gatekeepers” that decide—based on established news norms (Gans 1979)—which of the seemingly infinite number of human rights issues can occupy a portion of the news agenda. This paradigm has its strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, human rights news can under certain conditions motivate government officials to participate in actions that improve human rights conditions (Clark 2001). On the other hand, media reporting and NGO publicity strategies exhibit biases that limit what types of issues get covered and how (Bob 2005). In this section, I provide an overview of the key features of this paradigm and discuss its relative strengths and weaknesses with respect to the news coverage it produces.

Because of the news media’s central role in circulating human rights news, much scholarship has investigated the techniques NGOs and civic groups use to capture public attention. In their pathbreaking work, Keck and Sikkink (1998) discussed the emergence of an “information politics” (18) that saw advocacy groups strategically deploying facts and narratives in order to capture the attention of journalists—and, by extension, larger publics. In their account, NGOs provide news organizations with credible information that also adheres to established news norms of drama and timeliness. As they note: “[B]oth credibility and drama seem to be essential components of a strategy aimed at persuading publics and policymakers to changes their minds” (Keck and Sikkink 1998: 19). More recent accounts have further developed analyses of the methods such groups use to gather credible information (Clark 2001; Hopgood 2006), how NGOs translate their issues to appease dominant news norms that favor conflict and spectacle (Cottle and Nolan 2007; Waisbord 2011), and what conditions lead news organizations to pick up the information messages that NGOs send to them (Powers 2015a). Together, they point to the central role played by NGOs and the news media in shaping human rights news.

These efforts by NGOs to capture media attention have led to a number of success stories. Numerous case studies attest to instances where NGOs have broken into the news and secured substantial amounts of sympathetic coverage. For example, early efforts by Amnesty International to raise awareness of human rights violations under the Greek military junta in the 1960s successfully captured media attention in part due to the group’s framing of political torture occurring in the “cradle of democracy” (Clark 2001). These efforts isolated the junta from the Council of Europe, which Greece was forced to leave — under threat of expulsion—in 1968 (Clark 2001: 41). Human Rights Watch enjoyed similar early successes by attacking the complicity of the Reagan administration in human rights violations throughout Latin America. By challenging the administration’s claims with on-the-ground research, the group was able in some instances to get the administration to change policy (Neier 2003). More recent cases have identified similar instances where NGOs successfully work within the extant paradigm of human rights news to capture media attention and to force governments to alter their behavior on specific issues (Becker 2013).

Despite evidence of these successes, research has also identified a number of ways in which this paradigm limits what issues get covered and how. For starters, the total number of actors involved in producing most human rights news tends to be limited to a few elite NGOs (Thrall et al. 2014). Smaller groups are typically excluded from coverage, unless they can convince leading NGOs to partner with them. According to Bob (2005), such partnering efforts are often unsuccessful, as leading NGOs typically privilege causes and issues that conform to their own cultural, linguistic, and organizational preferences (as opposed to the nature of the human rights violation per se). Moreover, the relationship between NGOs and news outlets is itself not marked by parity. As Waisbord (2011) notes, the journalistic “beat” system favors governments, not NGOs. Groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch may succeed in capturing media attention, yet many of their efforts to generate coverage fall flat (Ron et al. 2005). In particular, their efforts to capture media attention on issues far outside the media spotlight are often futile. As one Amnesty International executive has put it: “You can work all you like on Mauritania, but the press couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Mauritania” (as quoted in Ron et al. 2005: 576).

This comment links up with a more general limitation of the human rights news paradigm: namely, its tendency to focus on a few topics and places that align with a narrow vision of human rights. Systematic content analyses conducted by Ramos and his collaborators (Ramos et al. 2007), for example, find that human rights news tends to be negatively associated with poverty. Other analyses argue that human rights tends to focus primarily on “political” violations like torture and detention, while sidelining human economic, social, and cultural rights (e.g., right not to live in poverty or, as indicated in the introductory example, “the right to be cold”; see, e.g., Williams 2010; Winston 2001). Still others find that attention cycles in the news media tend to be limited to a few cases (Thrall et al. 2014). Together, this means that many countries and issues fail to ever capture any level of news attention that would match objective measures of human rights conditions (e.g., levels of violence, poverty, etc.) in their country.

A final limitation of the extant human rights news paradigm is its tendency towards simplified, and sometimes highly misleading, narratives. This stems from the need for timeliness and drama required by news organizations to cover human rights issues (Cottle and Nolan 2007). Because news organizations provide news access to topics and issues that are newsworthy (rather than important per se), scholars have identified multiple instances where NGOs oversell or distort their claims to satisfy the news media’s demands. In a particularly egregious example, Cohen and Green (2012) find that news reports systematically overstated the relative rate of sexual violence during the Liberian civil war. In that case, both NGOs and journalists claimed that 75% or more of women had been raped, even though detailed surveys and interviews placed that number at somewhere between 10% and 20%. Such instances raise questions about whether the desire (and need) for media coverage may in fact reduce the long-term credibility of human rights news providers.

Taken together, the available research points to a paradigm of human rights news that is premised on the central role of the news media as gatekeepers, the important role played by leading NGOs as information providers, and a tendency to focus on human rights violations that emerge in the realm of politics more than economics, society, or culture. This paradigm has helped to make human rights news a regular topic in the news and, in some cases, it has also helped to spur government action on human rights problems. At the same time, though, the paradigm of human rights news tends to exclude a great number of human rights actors and issues; furthermore, its coverage of human rights issues often simplifies and distorts complex situations. This is a paradigm that came of age during the dominance of print and television news. As I discuss below, a number of changing contexts raise questions about the degree to which such a paradigm remains in operation today.

Changing institutional, discursive, and technological contexts

The paradigm of human rights news described above is based on a set of institutional, discursive, and technological contexts that are themselves being transformed. This raises interesting questions about whether the paradigm for human rights news will change alongside them, or if it will endure despite these changes. Below, I highlight three sets of changes that set the stage for thinking about a possible “new era” of human rights that may depart in some ways from this established paradigm of human rights news.

In the extant model of human rights news, the news media function as the primary gatekeepers, and NGOs are essentially reliant on them for publicity. Yet, remarkable changes in both sectors suggest that this relationship may be in the process of being reconfigured. Consider journalism first. Since the end of the Cold War, US news outlets have slashed their foreign news budgets: Fewer correspondents now staff fewer news bureaus in fewer parts of the world (Hannerz 2004). The amount of news space dedicated to international news has similarly decreased: from an average of nearly 40% of all news content in the 1980s to about 17% today (Powers 2013). Whatever the quality of their earlier “gatekeeping” efforts, today there exist real questions about the media’s role in human rights news (both in terms of whether they will report on an issue and in terms of how they will be able to separate out competing claims with little on-the-ground expertise; see Otto and Meyer 2012).

At the same time as the news media have cut back on human rights coverage, NGOs have assumed increasingly prominent roles in the provision of human rights news as a result of growing professionalization (as well as the institutionalization of human rights norms internationally). In addition to conducting original research, advocating with public officials, and waging public awareness campaigns, these groups take on a number of seemingly “journalistic” functions. To take just the two leading human rights NGOs as examples: Human Rights Watch now assigns photographers and videographers to produce multimedia packages that can accompany research reports (Bogert 2010). It draws from a staff of more than 400, a workforce that rivals the entire foreign news bureaus of leading US news providers like the New York Times or Washington Post. Similarly, Amnesty International staffs a “new unit” charged with being an online portal for human rights news (Bartlett 2011). It employs more than 125 research staff to gather information about human rights issues worldwide (Powers 2015b). Together, these changes in the journalism and NGO sectors raise the possibility of NGOs playing a more direct role in shaping news coverage of human rights, both in the news media and beyond for a variety of purposes, including but not limited to mobilizing supporters, to raising funds, and to providing the legal basis for criminal prosecution.

Beyond these institutional changes, the past decade has witnessed a transformation in the discursive meaning of human rights itself. If human rights news consistently focused on political abuses, this stemmed in part from the focus that the human rights community paid to these issues (Clark 2001). Over the past decade, though, the human rights community has developed a greater interest in social and economic rights (Robinson 2003). Moreover, human rights discourses are increasingly used to frame not only international affairs but domestic ones. In the United States and Europe, same-sex unions, reparations, and prison abuses are increasingly framed as human rights issues (see, e.g., Becker 2013). Analysts have evaluated these developments in negative or positive terms; my point here is simply to note the evolution of human rights discourses to accommodate a growing number of issues under its umbrella. This raises the possibility of human rights news focusing on a growing number ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Human rights in the news: Balancing new media participation with the authority of journalists and human rights professionals
• 1 A new era of human rights news? Contrasting two paradigms of human rights news-making
• 2 Source credibility as “information subsidy”: Strategies for successful NGO journalism at Mexican human rights NGOs
• 3 The rise of eyewitness video and its implications for human rights: Conceptual and methodological approaches
• 4 Nonprofit product placement: Human rights advocacy in film and television
• 5 Promoting the people’s surrogate: The case for press freedom as a distinct human right
• 6 News about her: The effects of media freedom and internet access on women’s rights
• 7 Beyond naming and shaming: New modalities of information politics in human rights
• Index