No News Is Good News: Human Rights Coverage in the American Print Media, 1980-2000

Several studies have analyzed media representations of human rights practices, but none has systematically examined whether those representations lead to skewed perceptions of repression or abuse. This phenomenon, referred to in the literature as the “information paradox,” poses serious problems for scholars attempting to gauge the extent of human rights violations or to evaluate measures taken to remediate them. This article considers whether increased awareness of and attention to human rights practices in fact distorts perceptions of abuse with an analysis of human rights coverage in two major American newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, between 1980 and 2000. Multivariate regression analyses are employed to identify the characteristics of countries that are mentioned in conjunction with human rights in these newspapers. Results show that human rights coverage tends to be negative, with repressive countries garnering the most attention. However, human rights reporting appears not to be tainted by an information paradox, inasmuch as coverage does not vary systematically by a country's respect for press freedoms, linkage to international civil society, or the extensiveness of its communication infrastructure.