Human Rights News in Professional and Citizen Media Comparative Content Analysis of Global Voices, the Guardian and Al - Jazeera
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Human rights news in professional and citizen media Comparative content analysis of Global Voices, The Guardian and Al - Jazeera Master Thesis Student: Vaida Razaityte Professor: Anna Roosvall Master’s programme in Media and Communication Studies The Department of Media Studies Stockholm University 18 August 2017 Abstract The thesis aims to analyse how human rights issues are reported by different types of transnational media channels – professional and citizen. More specifically, the human rights related articles published during 2016 in citizen media website Global Voices and two mainstream media channels – The Guardian and Al-jazeera English are analysed in a quantitative way and compared. The key focus of the analysis is drawn on theories about human rights representation in media, continuum of professionalism in the period of digitisation and globalisation of news. The quantitative content analysis helped to determine that there are more similarities in human rights representation in terms of content of information, than in the tools which are chosen to present human rights. Keywords: human rights news, network journalism, professionalism, citizen journalism, digitalisation, globalisation. 2 Contents INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................................... 6 Research aim and questions ............................................................................................................... 7 Expected outcome and limitations ..................................................................................................... 8 Structure of thesis ............................................................................................................................... 9 THEORY AND LITERATURE REVIEW ...................................................................................................... 10 Human rights and media representation ......................................................................................... 10 The continuum of professional journalism in the face of digitalisation ........................................... 13 Globalisation and human rights news .............................................................................................. 16 METHODS AND MATERIAL ................................................................................................................... 20 Quantitative content analysis ........................................................................................................... 20 Pilot Study ......................................................................................................................................... 20 Material ............................................................................................................................................. 21 Sampling ............................................................................................................................................ 23 Coding procedures and data analysis ............................................................................................... 24 Validity and reliability ....................................................................................................................... 27 RESULTS ................................................................................................................................................ 28 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS ......................................................................................................... 44 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................................... 49 APPENDICES .......................................................................................................................................... 55 3 List of figures Figure 1: Sampling scheme Figure 2: The proportion of analysed articles which were published in Al-jazeera, Global Voices and The Guardian during 2016. Figure 3: The distribution of human rights topics which represent the major issue in Al-jazeera’s articles published in 2016 Figure 4: The distribution of human rights topics which represent the reason of the first topic in Al-jazeera’s articles published in 2016 Figure 5: The distribution of human rights topics which represent the major issue in Global Voices’ articles published in 2016 Figure 6: The distribution of human rights topics which represent the reason of the first topic in Global Voices’ articles published in 2016 Figure 7: The distribution of human rights topics which represent the major issue in The Guardian’s articles published in 2016 Figure 8: The distribution of human rights topics which represent the reason of the first topic in The Guardian’s articles published in 2016 Figure 9: the distribution of hyperlinks which are used to extend the human rights stories by Al-Jazeera Figure 10: the distribution of hyperlinks which are used to extend the human rights stories by Global Voices Figure 11: the distribution of hyperlinks which are used to extend the human rights stories by The Guardian List of tables Table 1: the symmetric measures of significance between first and second human rights topics discussed in the articles by Al-Jazeera, Global Voices and The Guardian Table 2: the cross-tabulation between first and second human rights topics discussed in the articles by Al-Jazeera, Global Voices and The Guardian Table 3: the Chi-Square test of geographic and thematic distribution in the articles by Al-Jazeera, Global Voices and The Guardian Table 4: the symmetric measures of significance between geographic and thematic distribution in the articles by Al- Jazeera, Global Voices and The Guardian Table 5: The cross-tabulation results of regions’ representation by different news websites 4 Table 6: the distribution of scales in the articles by Al-Jazeera, Global Voices and The Guardian Table 7: the distribution of different forms which represent human rights issues in the articles by Al-Jazeera, Global Voices and The Guardian Table 8: the distribution of actors/sources which represent human rights issues in the articles by Al-Jazeera, Global Voices and The Guardian Table 9: the distribution of Human Rights instruments used in the articles by Al-Jazeera, Global Voices and The Guardian Table 10: the distribution of illustrations which are used to complement human rights stories in the articles by Al- Jazeera, Global Voices and The Guardian Abbreviations AJE – Al-Jazeera English EU – European Union GV – Global Voices HRW – Human Rights Watch TG – The Guardian UDHR – Universal Declaration of Human Rights UN – The United Nations 5 INTRODUCTION Over the centuries, a concept of “human rights” was reconsidered many times through different angles until it settled in one of the most leading international documents – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948). According to Hans Ingvar Roth (2016), UDHR is a document which promotes “global ethics that is more or less accepted as the obvious moral lingua franca in the world <...> [which] stands as a role model for successful intercultural communication concerning ethics” (Roth, 2016, p. 95). Another approach to this document emerged in relation to the establishment of transnational and international organisations which supervise that globally shared values would be implemented by different governments committing themselves to follow the same norms. Hence the idea behind UDHR was that it should serve as a legal basis beyond the nation states, as a “pillar” for individuals in unbalanced power relations with their governments. Consequently, the issues related to human rights were most of the times analysed through fundamental principles of philosophy, law or politics (Armaline, Glasberg, & Purkayastha, 2015; Fields, 2009). However, by the end of the 20th Century, researchers of other disciplines, such as sociology and anthropology expressed a critique on international human rights representations as being far too formalized. Their idea was to expand the focus on human rights with social aspects, to “investigate the social life of rights <...> how real people in real socio-cultural contexts come to interpret and to interact with state mechanisms and state policy”, and to fulfil the gap between policies and social practices (Armaline et al., 2015, p. 8). Also, the critique targeted the limited capacities of states “to protect and provide for the human rights in the face of other interests” (Armaline et al., 2015, p. 45), for example, economic interest. Hence, the attention on society, as a compiler of different social situations connected to human rights, became stronger, while before, the power over human rights construction was mobilised by the government, and legal institutions. This approach helped to activate the human rights discourse in wider environments - from politics to society. At the same time, the role of media in human rights discussions emerged – not only because of the increasing academic interest in the ways media cover human rights issues (Ovsiovitch, 1993; Bailliet, 2013; Brooten, 2015; Balabanova, 2015; Sampaio-Dias, 2016), but also due to intensive public debates how media could contribute or be used in order to influence the human rights situation around the globe (Sampaio-Dias, 2016; Jansen, Pooley, & Taub-Pervizpour, 2011). However, it would not be fair to state that media concern about human rights on the