ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 looked at the universe of stories that included the phrase human rights and found an extremely limited number of stories. Chapters 4 and 5 used cross-national comparison of the US and UK and expanded the search parameters to months and weeks where news coverage would be reasonably expected to include human rights stories to see if there were any human rights stories that did not use the phrase human rights in the text of the story. All three chapters so far have found so little human rights coverage on television news that a CNN Effect argument cannot be sustained. Human rights violations are simply not televised in either the US or the UK. Yet there is still one more path to pursue. Inspired by the case study methodology in Caliendo, Gibney, & Payne (1999), this chapter flips the previous chapters’ approach by examining the total television news coverage of three countries with known human rights concerns to see how these countries are covered and what share of the media coverage that each country receives involves human rights issues. China, Somalia, and Sudan were selected as case studies because they all have widely known human rights issues. Table 6.1 lists the Political Terror Scale (PTS) averages, CIRI Physical Integrity Index Averages, and CIRI New Empowerment Index for the three case studies from 1990–2009.
