Coverage of the First and the Second Generation Rights Representation of the findings

Please refer to the matrix of human rights represented in the introduction section of this chapter. The pie charts and the tables below show the results of the First and the Second Generation Rights represented in the four selected Western newspapers in percentages and in terms of framing/covering.

133

Table 12 Human rights represented in NYT

First Generation of Rights Second Generation of Rights Mere

Mention of Human

Rights Civil Rights Political Rights Social Rights Economic Rights Cultural Rights

6

Chart 1 Human rights represented in NYT

Table 13 Human rights represented in TT

First Generation of Rights Second Generation of Rights Mere

Mention of Human

Rights Civil Rights Political Rights Social Rights Economic Rights Cultural Rights

134

Chart 2 Human rights represented in TT

Table 14 Human rights represented in TG

First Generation of Rights Second Generation of Rights Mere

Mention of Human

Rights

Civil Rights Political Rights Social Rights Economic Rights Cultural Rights

45

135

Chart 3 Human rights represented in TG

Table 15 Human rights represented in WP

First Generation of Rights Second Generation of Rights Mere

Mention of Human

Rights Civil Rights Political Rights Social Rights Economic Rights Cultural Rights

39

136

Sub total 52 Sub total 19 Sub total 8 Sub total 3 Sub total 2

Chart 4 Human rights represented in WP

In comparison, interestingly, all four selected Western newspapers have the largest volume in civil rights categories and the smallest volume in Economic rights and Rights to Property (see figure 1).

Figure 1 The largest and the smallest volumes of the coverage of rights categories

137 Discussion of findings

The result depicted the largest volume of coverage as ‘civil rights’ which is no surprise, in retrospect, considering the theoretical review of the Western side with the emphasis on human rights in Chapter 4. Galtung (1994) spelt out the formula mentioning international human rights as equal to Western human rights; while human rights activists argued that international human rights are a Western concept in emphasising the First Generation Rights of civil rights and political rights (Donnelly 1984, Renteln 2013). Within the category of civil rights, the category of ‘the freedom of the media, information and the public’ is almost always, the most popular one in all four analysed Western newspapers. The results in this area are relatively higher than the others within the category of civil rights, apart from the TT.

Respectively, the counting results under the category of the ‘media, information and the public’ are: NYT: 24; TT: 9; TG: 37; WP: 30. Common framings are:

‘Journalists, about whom the government seemed so wary before the Games -- shutting down their access to human-rights Web sites and those critical of China -- have been practically pampered’

(Eckholm, August 11, 2008, NYT)

‘Members hijacked an FM radio beam for about 20 minutes Friday morning and, with an indistinct signal, broadcast interviews with human rights advocates and appeals for freedom of expression in China before being knocked off the air’

(Cody et al., August 9, 2008, WP)

‘Rogge faced a barrage of questions about China's right to host the Games given concerns over human rights abuses and media restrictions. At the time, he could say only that he was certain the promises would be met. Then, on May 12, disaster struck with a devastating earthquake. ‘The free reporting of the earthquake could not have happened without the Games,’ Rogge said’

(O’Connor, May 22, 2008, TT)

138

‘Activists of the emergent civil rights movement - concerned with anything from land reform to HIV/Aids - have been thrown into jail. Any domestic criticism has been suppressed, and the signers of a petition demanding ‘an Olympics spirit’ in human rights silenced. Foreigners have been evicted from the neighbourhood of the Olympics site. The Chinese press remains censored, and woe betide any visiting journalist who steps out of the tightly drawn line’

(Zhang, July 25, 2008, TG) However, it is worth noting that the slight difference of the rights reflected between the American and British newspapers that were analysed. Having discussed in Chapter 3, the American journalists tend to be more in favour of the principle of ‘objectivity’ (Cohen-Almagor 2008) while the British journalists would rather stay with the notion of

‘fact-centered’ (Chalaby 1996). Moreover, Papacharissi and Oliveira (2008) explain with reference to Semetko et al. (1991) that

‘the US press features a pragmatic orientation, in contrast to the sacerdotal orientation of the British press. The US press tends to cover events that have a demonstrable news and audience value, whereas the UK press covers events based on their inherent and accepted news value’

(2008, p. 59) Returning to the content analysis findings, though statistically, the researcher reached similar data in terms of the biggest and the smallest volumes of the rights reflected, the researcher does have a general observation of TT, being a British newspaper, associated the rights category of the ‘media, information and the public’ with topics or events, mostly through the dramatic protesting activities of Tibet and Darfur crisis (which will be explained later), compared to the other analysed newspapers. NYT, as being an American newspaper, reflects the rights category of ‘media, information and the public’ rather than ‘neutral’ topics on the freedom of the journalists to report or access information.

More findings and discussions on the framing styles will be presented in section 6.2.3.

Reviewing the third cognate study from Smith (2008) (see section 2.2 in Chapter 2), insightful explanations could be raised to explain why there is such a focus on the issue of the civil rights of freedom in the coverage of the Beijing Olympics. According to Smith

139 (2008), the Chinese government still retains ultimate control over the media and journalism (also see the Chinese media system in Chapter 3, section 3.3), while the issue of the foreign press reporting guidelines is only a document, which came out under international and global civil society’s pressure with the release of media restrictions and the ‘palliative’

improvements of human rights, particularly when press freedom is only for the sake of

successfully hosting the Beijing Olympics. In other words, the civil rights of the press and the information freedom are never ever really addressed in China. As long as the Chinese and foreign journalists threaten the central government’s interests, they will face harassment, abuse and even detention. This might explain why such results of heavy focus on civil rights issues were found in the media, information and the public through this PhD research.

Turning to the other category of political rights, most of the coverage is devoted to the involved area of ‘political security’ in all four analysed Western newspapers: NYT: 19; TT:

6; TG: 13; WP: 13. The dominant news topic/stories that come under this aspect of the political rights and political security are about the violence/conflict which happened in Tibet and Darfur.

To give a brief contextual background about these two violent conflicts, the Tibet rioting happened on the 14^th of March, 2008, about five months before the official start of the Beijing Olympics Ceremony. It was commonly cited by China’s domestic news media as

‘3.14 Tibet riots’, internationally known as ‘2008 Tibetan unrest’. The riots started on the 10^th of March 2008 when hundreds of monks from Drepung monastery walked on the street peacefully protesting and calling for religious freedom with the demand for the release of the imprisoned monks as part of Tibetan Uprising Day’.

On 14^th March, 2008 the peaceful protest quickly descended into violent riots leading to looting, smashing, burning down of houses and shops as well as killing Tibetan and non-Tibetan residents. On the 20^th of March 2008, the Chinese Central Television broadcasted a special feature with the title of ‘a record of the violent incident involving beating, smashing, looting and burning in Lhasa’ (Smith Jr. 2010). Suggested by Topgyal (2011), that this is ‘the most recent episode in the long-running saga of the Sino-Tibetan insecurity dilemma’ (p.

183). The Sino-Tibetan issue is identified as a mixture of political as well as human rights controversy: the Chinese government declares that their legitimised ruling in Tibet is a

140 historical issue is imperative on one hand and remains as a new Marxist mission on the other;

while the Tibetan independent activists protest that Tibet is under the Chinese Communist Party’s totalitarian control with their basic human rights being abused (Ownby 2011).

Sudan’s Darfur conflict in 2008, according to the BBC news (2010), resulted in around 300,000 deaths and 2.7 million people having to flee their homes (quoted from the UN by BBC). The conflict started as early as 2003, when the Sudan Liberation Army and Justice and Equality Movement began attacking the government of Sudan accusing them of oppression against the black Africans (non-Arab Muslims) but in favour of the Arabs, a campaign they described as ‘ethnic cleansing’. According to World without Genocide (2012), the whole conflict is also referred to as the ‘Darfur Genocide’, ‘the current mass slaughter and rape of Darfuri men, women and children in Western Sudan…the first genocide in the 21^st century’.

Both the American President and British Prime Minister had responded to the conflict and called for intervention in 2006 and 2007. By early 2008, the UN issued a hybrid United Nations-African Union mission (UNAMID) with 26,000 troops being proposed in an attempt to maintain peace in Darfur. However, only 9,000 were sent eventually. The reason that China is being blamed and accused of human rights issues in the Darfur Genocide is largely because China supplied the Sudan government with most of the weapons such as helicopters, tanks, fighter planes, bombers, rocket propelled grenades and machine guns. The World without Genocide (2012) states, along with Russia, China opposed UN peacekeeping troops and blocked many UN resolutions in attempts to appease the Sudanese government.

According to the matrix of human rights (seen in the introduction section earlier), any framing in the news content that included a direct or indirect mentioning or description related to the ‘harm (or the protection) against violence from the state or non-state sources or related to the ‘rights of being protected’, would be counted as covering the political security area under the category of political rights. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states: ‘everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person’ and Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states: ‘everyone has the right to liberty and security of person’. The intensive focus on the framings of the violence that happened during the conflicts of Tibet and Darfur in terms of the killing, rioting,

arresting or cracking down eventually reflects upon the harm of the right to life and security,

141 hence made the ‘political rights of political security’ the second largest coverage out of all five main categories of human rights coverage in the four analysed Western newspapers.

Common framings are exemplified below:

‘According to the Chinese government, the violence that began in Lhasa in March destroyed 7 schools, 5 hospitals and 120 homes. Tibetan exile groups say more than 200 people, most of them Tibetans, were killed in the crackdowns that followed in Western China. They also reject the government's contention that fewer than 100 people are awaiting trial, saying many more are in custody’

(Jacobs and Kumar, April 30, 2008, NYT)

‘Protests erupted in Tibetan regions of China on March 10, when monks were arrested for demonstrating and calling for the return of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader. The protests soon spread and, in some places, broke out into deadly riots in the worst unrest Tibet has experienced in nearly 20 years. Thousands of Chinese armed police were sent to put down the protests and arrest those involved, sparking condemnations from international human rights groups’

(Drew, April 9, 2008, WP)

‘It also sent out an audio file of Mr Thom speaking from his mobile phone while still up the pole. He said that he was standing ‘in solidarity’ with Tibetans who took to the streets of Lhasa in a violent protest against Chinese rule in March. The demonstrators set fire to hundreds of shops and offices in riots that killed at least 22 people, mainly ethnic Han Chinese. China has mounted a huge security operation across Tibetan areas to try to prevent further demonstrations’

(Macartney et al. August 7, 2008, TT)

‘There is no doubt the fallout from last Friday's deadly riots has been bloody. The Dalai Lama's government-in-exile puts the number of dead at ‘about 100’. China says 16 people have been killed’

(Author unknown, March 21, 2008, TG)

142 Though the framing angles and the cited perspectives are slightly different from each

newspaper, one of the common phenomena is that all four newspapers have cited sources from China, mostly the data on injuries and deaths. Understandably, this could be as a result of the lack of freedom of the press in China, which has also had the largest volume of the rights reflected upon, in comparison to other categories of rights in all four newspapers.

However, what is critical and essential to be noted here in this finding by the researcher is the lack of focus on another security-related issue – the Wenchuan earthquake. On the 12^th of May, less than 3 months before the official beginning of the Beijing Olympics ceremony, China experienced a 7.9-magnitude earthquake (some other sources reported as

8.0-magnitude), centered in Wenchuan, Sichuan Province. According to BBC News (2013), the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake resulted in about 87,150 people being either presumed dead or missing and about 4.8 million people left homeless.

Though this is not directly about the human rights concerns, Lai and Hui (2009) argue that the Sichuan Earthquake serves as a means of connecting the Chinese government’s authority and legitimacy through centralisation on the control of crisis management. In this process of crisis management, key problems emerged but did not limit it to the respect of individual rights, the rule of law, the protection of individual properties, corruption, and the

transparency issue related to the media and information control (Lai and Hui 2009). These key problems are nevertheless connected to some extent towards human rights concerns of the right to life, legal and judicial structure, democracy, freedom of the press and the

provision of information and so on. However, in comparison to the intensity of the coverage of Tibet and Darfur violence, the Wenchuan Earthquake received very limited attention among the selected news items that are confirmed for content analysis in this PhD research.

In the news items that were confirmed for analysis from the NYT, only 6 of them covered the earthquake; from the WP, only 7 of them covered it; from the TT, only 2 of them covered it;

and from the TG, only 6 of them covered it. Further, the coverage of the earthquake in these news items is not necessarily in human rights framings. According to Galtung and Ruge (1965), the news values theory explains that the news is rather negative, elite-focused, as well as personal and conflict oriented. To expand the news values intoonto human rights news reporting, the heavily focused coverage on Tibet and Darfur conflicts with limited focus coverage on the Wenchuan Earthquake indicated: when the news editors/reporters select the

143 human rights issues to report, the nature and the impact of such issues is not the only absolute decisive factor for it to receive the news coverage, but rather, the story/event of the human rights issues that evolve from the key element as a consideration. In a case of competing human rights issues, initiated from negative but violent and/or conflict events (such as war or riots) towards the negative, but tend to remain as a relief related event (such as earthquake), the news media is more likely to choose the former for reporting instead of the latter.

In a critical review, this finding rather supports the practice of HWJ that leans towards a violent or dramatic conflict as a news values parameter. Instead the practice of HRJ puts the concern for human rights at the heart of journalistic practice. Furthermore, returning to the content analysis results (see Chapter 6 and 7, section 6.2 and 7.2), there is a very noticeable imbalance between the coverage on the First Generation Rights and the Second Generation Rights, which again does not suggest the practice of HRJ that promotes a comprehensive view on all the categories on the concern of human rights. Lastly, apart from the coverage on the First and the Second Generation of Rights, there is a big proportion of coverage on the mere mentioning of the human rights issues among all four selected Western newspapers.

‘Mere mentioning of the human rights issues’, refers to the framings that are too fractional or too limited for the researcher to identify. See the example below:

‘The changes in China since then -- the economic rise, the emerging openness -- seem almost beyond comprehension to him. He finds much to criticize about China's record on human rights, Li said, but he also feels proud that Beijing will host the Summer Games’

(Godwin, June 24, 2008, NYT) The news item that contains the news content above does not further indicate what it is about China’s record on human rights and why it criticises it. It merely mentions that China has human rights issues. This aspect will be further discussed in a later section discussing the results of news reporting styles.