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The Whole World Could Be Watching: Human Rights and the Media

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14754830701334632

1475-4843

Clair Apodaca,

Political Conflict and Governance

Abstract This article investigates the effect of access to media reporting and press freedom on the achievement of human rights. Past research on the role of the media on human rights has often been limited to anecdotal examples or limited case studies. There has been little comprehensive systematic investigation on the topic. Specifically, this article answers the questions: Do large communication capabilities (large numbers of TVs, radios, Internet users, and newspapers) and few journalistic restrictions advance human rights protections? Or does access to media technologies, facilitated by a state-censored media, act as a tool of human rights abuse? The statistical analysis shows what many reports have often claimed but rarely demonstrated. There is indeed a significant relationship between access to the media and press freedom and levels of human rights violations. Dr. Clair Apodaca received her PhD from Purdue University in 1996. Dr. Apodaca served on Executive Committee on Human Rights for the American Political Science Association as Section Secretary. Her areas of research include US foreign policy, the international protection of human rights, and women's human rights. Her work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Human Rights Quarterly, Journal of Refugee Studies, and Asian Survey. Notes ∗t < .05; ∗∗t < .01; ∗∗∗t < .001 Stata Release 6 1. A recent example is the revelation that fourteen European countries were accessories in a “‘spider's web’ of human rights abuses” resulting in the CIA extraordinary rendition scandal (CitationSilva 2006). The result of the story first published in the Washington Post was special investigations undertaken by the Council of Europe and the European Parliament, citizen protests in the involved countries, politician backtracking, and global outrage. 2. Two examples of the formation of social or civil movements created because of human rights violations and the desire to change the repressive political system are the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the Helsinki Watch Groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1980s. 3. In 1983, a civilian government pardoned military and political officials who were involved in Argentina's Dirty War. However, the work of the Mothers continued until 2006. After Nestor Kirchner became president of Argentina in 2003, he suspended the immunity of the military leaders who disappeared over thirty thousand people (the Mother's estimate; the military claims only nine thousand) (CitationAnavy 2006). 4. As the US war in Iraq demonstrates, the state does not have to directly control the media to use the media as a tool of human rights abuse. CitationKull, Ramsay, and Lewis (2003/2004) report that a biased media can create public misperceptions thus encouraging the public to support questionable Presidential behavior [the illegal invasion with no apparent concern for the human collateral damage]. Kull et al. found that “Fox was the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions” (2003/2004: 583). A Fox viewer was twice as likely to hold the misperception that the United States found close links between al Qaeda and Iraq. In fact, 80 percent of Fox news views held at least one of the following false perceptions: that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda, that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and/or that the United States' invasion was backed by world public opinion. 5. In order to avoid biasing the regression results, the focus of the analysis is on the developing countries. Including developed countries, all of which have good human rights, high levels of press freedom, and very high levels of media access (during the time period under study), would stack the deck, assuring that I would find a strong positive relationship between human rights and media access and/or press freedoms. 6. This temporal span was chosen for practical reasons. Operationally, some of the key variables used in this study, particularly media access, only go back to the late 1980s. The UNESCO data, the World Bank's ultimate source of data, on TV and radio receivers per 1000, prior to 1985, is spotty, unreliable and carelessly collected and reported. By 1988, there appears to be a reliable and coherent sample. 7. Serial or autocorrelation inflates the standard errors of the estimates, thereby making it more difficult for a coefficient to become statistically significant. However, even with serial correlations, the coefficients will remain unbiased and consistent. With large samples, a robust Huber/White/sandwich estimator will help to correct the inflation in the standard errors. 8. The Political Terror Scale (PTS) codes countries on a scale of 1–5 according to the level of political violence and terror experienced by that country in a particular year: Level 1: Countries under a secure rule of law, people are not imprisoned for their view, and torture is rare or exceptional. Political murders are extremely rare. Level 2: There is a limited amount of imprisonment for nonviolent political activity. Few persons are affected, torture and beatings are exceptional. Political murder is rare. Level 3: There is extensive political imprisonment, or a recent history of such imprisonment. Execution or other political murders and brutality may be common. Unlimited detention, with or without a trial, for political views is accepted. Level 4: The practices of level 3 are expanded to larger numbers. Murders, disappearances, and torture are a common part of life. In spite of its generality, on this level terror affects those who interest themselves in politics or ideas. Level 5: The terrors of level 4 have been expanded to the whole population. The leaders of these societies place no limits on the means or thoroughness with which they pursue personal or ideological goals. For a discussion on the methodology and coding scheme used in the PTS, see CitationMark Gibney and Michael Dalton (1996). 9. The strength of the PTS scale is its balance. The Political Terror Scale counterbalances the often biased reports of the State Department with the ideologically and politically neutral reports of Amnesty International. For a discussion of the merits and shortcomings of the Amnesty reports and the State Department's Country Reports, see CitationPoe, Tate, and Keith (1999). 10. In fact, the access to the modes of mass communication and the exposure to diverse ideas and opinions are so important that UNICEF has determined that the lack of access to radio, television, computers, books, or newspapers is an indicator of a severe deprivation of children's basic human needs, hence a human rights violation. Governmental policies or actions that prevent access to information are characterized as extreme deprivations of children's basic needs (CitationUNICEF 2000). UNICEF concluded that lack of access to information—often corollary to a restriction in means of mass communication—is a crucial contemporary human rights issue. 11. Similarly, Article 19 (2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states, “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.” 12. Governments' attempts to control the Internet and filter information have been, at least during the time period of this study, only partially successful. Unless the government totally and effectively prohibits the possession of computers, hackers will defeat filters and other forms of regulation. Unfortunately, most users of the Internet do not possess the skills needed to work around a government's determination to filter out sensitive political and economic information. And, according to Drezner, authoritarian governments are becoming more effective at inhibiting the growth of Internet usage while maintaining economic capabilities (2006). 13. Governments who wish to control Internet use by their citizens, fearing the introduction of rights and freedoms, are caught in a bind if they also wish to lure FDI, high value trade, and technologies. These new forms of production and technologies require the use of computer systems. 14. Data was collected on all developing countries, yet, due to missing data, several countries fell from the sample. Statistical programs drop countries that have missing data. The great majority of missing data is due to small island nations such as Barbados, Comoros, Dominica, Samoa, Sao Tome, St. Lucia, etc. However, it should be noted that most of these nations are given good to very good ratings by Freedom House and the Political Terror Scale for press freedom and human rights respectively. On the other hand, a couple of notorious countries, like Afghanistan or Iraq, also lacked data and were dropped from the computations. 15. As a result of the strict restrictions placed on journalists their reporting is often little more then government propaganda. A disturbing example is the US government's control and dispensing of cleansed “news briefings.” As a result of these practices journalistic freedom has been further shackled. The United States military once restricted, but now completely shut down, journalistic access to Guantánamo Bay (CitationB. Fox 2006). Human rights lawyers and journalists believe that without access to prisoners the “media sees a very sanitized view of what's going on,” leaving the prisoners in an ever more precarious position (CitationB. Fox 2006). 16. I would like to thank Franke Wilmer for calling my attention to this point. The ability to shame a state over its human rights conditions, thus deterring future violations, can only be effective if the state attaches value to its international reputation. 17. The data, along with information on the collection methods and coding schemes, can be located at the University of Maryland's website http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/polity. 18. The Cook-Weisberg test for heteroskedasticity indicates that the model is homoskedastic, meaning that the model exhibits constant error variance. A variance inflation factor (VIF) tolerance examination reveals that multicollinearity is not a problem. 19. The primary problem with being overly collinear is that it inflates the standard errors of the slope estimates. The greater the collinearity, the larger the standard errors. When this occurs, the researcher incorrectly rejects the variable when in fact it is statistically significant. This is Type II error. Recall that the t ratio (the test for statistical significance for b) is t = b/SE. The r2 is unaffected and the coefficients are unbiased (true). 20. A coefficient can be read as for every one unit increase in the independent variable there is an associated increase/decrease in the dependent variable. For example, the coefficient for radio receivers is −.005, which means that for every one unit increase in radio receivers (as measured at the number per 1000 people), there is a reduction in the PTS score by .005. Or, for every 100 more people per 1000 people who own a radio there is an associated reduction of the PTS by half a point. Since the PTS is measured on a 5-point scale, this is a rather large reduction in human rights violations. 21. The BBC website is located at http://www.bbc.co.uk (accessed April 2006). 22. The long-standing preeminence of the United States in the international syndication and world television programming is indisputable. The United States dominates the world market because it is profitable for both the US and foreign television stations. Domenico reports that “an international commercial TV station reportedly can derive up to a 70 per cent profit from an American show, or a public station can achieve a considerable savings in production costs” (2001: 46). Thus, in 1990, US distributors had a 69 percent market share of the worldwide programming export market. Fred Cohen, president of King World International and chairman of the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) international committee, estimated that by 2000, NATPE would be 60 percent domestic and 40 percent international. Studio executives claim that over 50 percent of their sales are coming from international buyers (CitationColman and Schlosser 1998). 23. Although officially prohibited, televisions and satellite dishes are sold openly and widely used with only sporadic government crackdowns.