Abstract
Why is it that media coverage of human rights issues varies across cities and countries? John Pollock’s Journalism and Human Rights: How Demographics Drive Media Coverage answers this question. Common explanations include personal characteristics of journalists, professional norms, and news-gathering routines. In this book, Pollock adopts an alternative perspective. He uses a unique community structure approach to “explore links between varied city (or national) demographics and coverage of emerging human rights issues in varied leading . . . newspapers in different nations or varied U.S. city newspapers. . . .”
Journalism and Human Rights, which grew out of a special issue of Atlantic Journal of Communication, is an extension of Pollock’s earlier books, Tilted Mirrors: Media Alignment With Political and Social Change—A Community Structure Approach (Hampton Press) and Media and Social Inequality: Innovations in Community Structure Research (Routledge). The theme of these books centers on the role of the media in social and political change. Rather than serving the interests of powerful elites in society, Pollock argues that the media are capable of representing and acting for the needs and concerns of social actors that experience and suffer social inequalities.
The 166-page book presents eight empirical studies that provide support for the theoretical proposition. In this book, Pollock makes several noteworthy contributions to the literature on mass media processes. First, these studies investigate newspaper coverage of emerging human rights issues. The issues under examination are diverse, including human trafficking, HIV/AIDS, water handling, child labor, same-sex marriage, detainee rights at Guantanamo Bay, immigration reform, and posttraumatic stress. Although HIV/AIDs and same-sex marriage are prominent issues that have received scholarly attention, the other issues have been relatively unexplored in terms of media reporting. By including a wide range of human rights issues, Pollock shows patterns of rights coverage across human rights categories.
Second, Pollock uses what he calls the “Media Vector” formula to measure newspaper coverage of human rights issues. Although content analysis studies traditionally analyze various aspects of news content separately (e.g., frequency, prominence, valence, etc.), Media Vectors simultaneously capture two dimensions, prominence (based on placement of an article, headline size, article length, and photos/graphics) and direction (“favorable/unfavorable/balance-neutral” or “government responsibility/society responsibility/balanced-neutral”). By producing a single continuous score tapping prominence and direction, Media Vectors “measure article ‘projection’ onto audiences.”
Third, Pollock adopts a comparative framework to investigate how human rights issues are covered in newspapers. Previous research grounded in a community structural perspective has focused mainly on a select few communities or communities within a single state of the United States. Pollock moves beyond this tradition by performing national comparisons of newspapers in a wide range of metropolitan cities as well as cross-national comparisons of leading national newspapers in different countries. Using the multi-dimensional Media Vector measurement, the eight studies reported in the book identify noticeable variations in newspaper coverage of human rights issues across U.S. metropolitan cities and across countries.
Finally, all eight studies are grounded in a shared theoretical framework. Pollock and his associates show that variations in human rights coverage are related to several demographic characteristics of the cities or the countries newspapers serve. Notably, cross-national studies demonstrate that country-level indicators of female empowerment, such as female school life expectancy and female literacy rate, play a pivotal role in explaining country-level variations in human rights coverage. Equally important are findings from U.S. nationwide multi-city studies showing that newspapers favorably cover the interests of vulnerable or marginal social groups. For example, newspaper coverage of same-sex marriage was found to be more favorable in communities with a greater number of organizations marketing to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community.
The overall patterns of results reported in the book support the theoretical proposition that the media have the ability to produce content that can challenge dominant elites and value systems and accommodate the needs of stakeholders and vulnerable. The theoretical and methodological coherence, coupled with examinations of diverse human rights issues, adds to the robustness of the proposition. Pollock does not address whether such news content generates societal changes that benefit underrepresented groups, nor does he explore underlying reasons why journalists in different social settings treat human rights issues in different ways. Such questions, however, are properly acknowledged and can provide meaningful directions for future research.
Overall, the book presents a unified set of empirical studies with coherent theoretical and methodological orientation. It would be a thought-provoking read for scholars who are interested in structural antecedents of media coverage and the role the media play in social and political change.