ABSTRACT
Determining whether or not the CNN Effect exists on human rights issues begins with analyzing all of the human rights content of television news. Chapter 3 is the first of several different approaches to measuring human rights content of television news: a large-scale transcript analysis applied to the American case 1 by searching ABC World News transcripts from 1990–2009 on LexisNexis. 2 It is important to note that any LexisNexis transcript search must be conducted carefully, as duplicate stories are sometimes generated by the search results, especially in the earlier years of this study. 3 In total, 824 stories that include the phrase “human right!” 4 were analyzed for topic, country, category of human rights, and type of story.
