Bringing the Media in: Newspaper Readership and Human Rights

摘要

Cross-national studies examining human rights outcomes have seldom considered the role of the news media. This is unfortunate, as a large body of work in media stud ies suggests that the news industry effectively educates citizens, shapes public attitudes, and stimulates political action. I juxtapose these two literatures in a cross-national con text to examine the print media's impact on a state's human rights performance. First, examining micro-level evidence from the World Values Survey, T show that an individ ual's level of media consumption, including newspaper readership, is positively associ ated with participation in human rights organizations. Next, I present macro-level evidence regarding the aggregate effect of a society's newspaper readership on its human rights record. Analyzing an unbalanced dataset with a maximum of 459 obser vations across 138 countries covering four waves during the 1980-2000 period, I use ordered probit regression to examine the relationship between a state's newspaper read ership and its Amnesty International rating. I find that newspaper readership exerts strong, positive effects on a state's human rights practices net of other standard predic tors and temporal/regional controls. Moreover, the effect of readership is robust to a number of alternative specifications that address concerns with ceiling effects, measure ment bias, influential observations, sample composition, mediation, endogeneity, and the impact of alternative forms of media consumption (i.e., the Internet and television).