Television News and Human Rights in the Us & UK: The Violations Will Not Be Televised by Shawna M Brandle

Author:Shawna M Brandle [Brandle, Shawna M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Media Studies, Social Science, Political Science, General, Human Rights
ISBN: 9781317439653
Google: oWFACwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28410222
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

Closely examining one month of British shooting scripts, American transcripts, and print news from both countries provides evidence that concurs with several of the conclusions made in the previous chapter. Again, there is not much human rights content in television news, and what little there is often focuses on foreign countries. This is true for the UK as well as for the US, though to a lesser extent for the UK, as it broadcasts both more human rights stories and more domestic human rights stories than the US does. Major issues sometimes monopolize television news broadcast time, as happened during February 1990 with the hot topics of the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, German reunification, and political reform and liberation movements within the USSR. This analysis shows that even when a hot topic is an obvious human rights issue, such as apartheid in South Africa, human rights framing to coverage is not guaranteed. Human rights detail was lacking in most stories in the US and UK, though the BBC did include some stories with more extensive details. Both the nightly news’s inability to spend too much time on background information and human rights being only one competing frame among many for stories help to explain the very small number of human rights and close to human rights stories. Comparison with quantitative rankings of human rights conditions around the world as well as with print news from the New York Times and the Times provides evidence that while there are many significant human rights issues happening throughout the world, television news simply is not covering them. The violations are not being televised.

To best way to account for the potential differences between using LexisNexis transcripts for the American case and BBC shooting scripts for the British case, as well as for the lack of publicly available shooting scripts after 1995, is to compare full broadcasts the way audiences would have seen them aired. Using full broadcasts as the data source means that for both cases, exactly what was broadcast to audiences is being evaluated, eliminating the possibility that errors were made in transcription or that changes were made during the broadcast that were not noted on the archived shooting scripts. Using full broadcasts makes the results more comparable. In addition, expanding the time frame from just one month in 1990 to one week per year from 1990 to 2009 simultaneously provides more depth and breadth to the story of how the violations do not get televised. It is to that large task that this study now turns.

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