The violations will not be televised: Television news coverage of human rights in the US and UK
Item
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Title
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The violations will not be televised: Television news coverage of human rights in the US and UK
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:db1a9b9c167c:11769
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identifier
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12402
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Creator
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Brandle, Shawna M.,
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Contributor
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George Andreopoulos | Brigitte Nacos
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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International relations | Communication | human rights | news | television | UK | US
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Abstract
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This study briefly reviews the relevent communication studies and international relations literatures to build the foundation for the content analyses by defining terms and highlighting the most salient points for comparison between the media and human rights systems in the US and UK. It then moveson to three different types of content analysis on American television news broadcasts and two different types on British television news broadcasts, all with the goal of determining how those media systems cover human rights and how that coverage differs across media systems. First, a content analysis of all of the stories containing the phrase human rights from one US network news broadcast from 1990-2009 is conducted to see the amount of human rights coverage in the US in the post-Cold War period and examines both the issues and the countries that are covered in the context of human rights in the US. Then one month of transcripts/shooting scripts for evening news broadcasts in the US and UK in 1990 is examined to see what, if any, kinds of stories might be covering human rights issues without explicitly using the phrase human rights. Finally, a visual analysis of one week of evening news broadcasts for the US and UK from 1990-2009 is conducted, comparing which stories are covered in each country, as well as how they are covered. As it turns out, there is very little human rights coverage on television news, period. There is more human rights coverage in the UK than in the US, but not as much more as might have been expected, given the states' differing approaches to human rights and differing television media systems. One key difference between the two countries' coverage is the depth of coverage of human rights stories; once the UK covers a human rights issue, it tends to do it more thoroughly, from more angles, and with more explanation, so the audience is more likely to learn about human rights when they are covered on the BBC than when they are covered on NBC or ABC.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Political Science
