Media Reporting on Human Rights in China Not Objective, Scholars Say
Reporting on human rights in China by major European media is not shaped by objective facts but by drastic events, news values, China’s foreign affairs and increasing economic importance, according to China Policy Institute research fellow Dr Li ZHANG in a paper in the Journal of International Communication co-authored with Dr Robin BROWN of the University of Leeds.
2/2/2010
The paper’s findings help explain short-term spikes in media scrutiny following a drastic event, such as the Tiananmen Incident or the crackdown on the Falun Gong religious group. It also corresponds to the inconsistency found between the volume of international media coverage on the issue and the actual state of human rights measured by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International over the period examined by the paper.
The paper, “Reporting Chinese Human Rights: ‘Reality,’ Economics and Diplomatic Conflict as Drivers of Coverage by Transnational Newspapers, 1989-2005,”* is a result of an investigation of the factors that drive the media coverage of human rights in China among the major transnational newspapers in Europe, through a detailed analysis of coverage in the The Financial Times , The Economis t, and The International Herald Tribune.
The paper’s authors analysed the news values of those international media outlets, their news agenda and western governments’ human rights policy towards China, and found a decline in the prominence of coverage on the human rights issue over a longer term, due in part to the rise of the economic news agenda and evolving foreign relations across the period.
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* L. ZHANG AND R. BROWN, 2009. Reporting Chinese human rights: "Reality", economics and diplomatic conflict as drivers of coverage by transnational newspapers. Journal of International Communication, 15(2), 97-119.