ABSTRACT
The increased salience of human rights in media coverage since the 1990s is a recognition of media becoming 'more receptive to human rights issues today than at any time in the modern history of the media' seeing them as more newsworthy than ever before. Ideas about human rights now appear to play an important role in setting, communicating and critiquing political agendas on foreign policy. This chapter utilizes an historical lens to explore the developing media-human-rights relationship in foreign policy. It explores in a more technical sense how these competing claims have been tested through research that has aimed to detect and assess the influence of the media. The chapter also addresses more specifically the claims about system change resulting from the radical developments in the media environment in the 21st century, and what these may mean for the media-human-rights relationship.
