The Role of the Media

Examine the role of media – how were activists successful in getting media coverage? What type of media? Did the media play a helpful or harmful role? Was success contingent on the media?

We learned in our reading Transnational Information Politics: NGO Human Rights Reporting, 1986-2000 that, although Amnesty International did increase the number of its press reports released in the 1990s, it did so while publishing less background papers. The organization’s relationship with the media could be construed as a dependent one and that this must naturally condition its work. However, the authors argue that their data instead supports claims made by Amnesty insiders of a shift in strategy as the organization grew wise to the power of press coverage. They report that the internal strategy of Amnesty became creating sound-bite style reporting which could be easily appropriated by the media and turned around quickly for audience consumption. Of course, now that this relationship has been forged over time, and press releases have become an important part of the organizations repertoire for building public support of its causes, it could be argued that the successes of Amnesty campaigns (now that arguably success is measured by those producing the press releases as specific to the kind of attention media coverage has the potential to produce) are contingent, at least in part, on the media. Furthermore, and most importantly for my analysis, the authors found that background reports and press releases used one year affect what gets covered and how it is covered in the next. In other words, new issues are grafted on to existing, known issues. Thus press releases and background papers launch a cycle of press coverage in a procedural, expanding, incremental way. Amnesty insiders see this as a form of persistence which allows them to keep governments on the defensive when they know scrutiny will continue even after the parent issue loses some of its ability to attract page-one press coverage and the public’s attention.

Therefore, we can say that although only a few major issues make it on to the global agenda through campaigns and press coverage, there are potentially many related issues riding their coat tails thanks in part to world events and NGOs seizing windows of opportunity to keep long-standing core issues in the public’s eye. Those issues that eventually see the light of day, thanks to ground-breaking work by NGOs and the press, will naturally impact how the parent issue is perceived. Frames are made, but we must not assume that they are fixed.

To evaluate the kind of press coverage the issue of human trafficking garnered over the years, I did a search in the Lexis-Nexis databases of international publications from 1970-2008. Reports of human trafficking initially appeared in my search with a report released in May of 1979 contending that Vietnam was exporting thousands of its refugees to neighboring Asian countries. In July of that same year, China labeled Vietnam’s problem “slave trafficking.” In 1981 the South Korean government was accused of trafficking in prostitutes and in 1982 the Thai government was accused of child slavery with a sensational report published in the Daily Mirror. This was followed in the same year with reports of sex slaves working in Bangkok brothels and instances of child snatching in the press and television news series. In 1983 China was accused of allowing trafficking in women by organized crime networks. Then, in 1986, there were quite a few articles about children sold for sex followed by reports concerning the trafficking of body parts. Trafficking in human organs and drug trafficking dominated the news from the Reagan years (with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign) from approximately 1986 to 1990.

Meanwhile, in 1988 there was a report of a million children being sold in the sex trade. By 1989, this number had increased to 10 million. In 1990 there was a new spate of articles concerning human slavery followed by a similar number of reports on the sex trade in 1992. In 1992 China was reported to have banned trade in organs and in 1993 the UN condemned child slavery. This kind of press coverage continued throughout the 1990s and into this century touching upon various related subjects such as child smuggling, mail order brides, and child brides. However, perhaps most importantly for the framing of human trafficking today, 1993 and 1994 saw trafficking coincide with an increased focus on the problems of illegal immigration.
Although our readings contend that the media did not influence to any significant extent Amnesty International’s work, it does appear that the media has played an important role in forming the public’s perception of problems and solutions. I would argue that media coverage had a lot to do with the success of human trafficking reaching its present frame on the global agenda; the problem is now firmly linked to prostitution, women, children, poor countries, illegal immigration, and organized crime.

Whereas trafficking and prostitution in the late 1970s and early 1980s focused on states as perpetrators of the problem, the issue gradually became associated with organized crime networks in Asia. A shift in focus to illegal immigration certainly brought the already-known issue of human slavery and trafficking into the backyards of many western observers thus making it a problem requiring the developed world to act as well. Certainly the women’s rights movements and associated NGOs, as I have previously reported, increased the profile of human rights violations in the form of domestic and public violence against women, and, with these issues, trafficking of women and children was also brought to the fore. We also have learned from our readings that NGOs such as Amnesty international purposefully focused on the abuses of the wealthy and powerful countries of the North to counter any claims of bias they were encountering in the global South.

Certainly this strategy had the effect of increasing awareness in the West that they too shared in the problem of trafficking. Bridging the problems of the developing world with the problems of the West, I believe, has been one of NGOs greatest success stories. Of course, there is an undeniable dark side to this success; the framing of human trafficking as inextricably with prostitution and criminality – and the subsequent securitizing of immigration – has narrowed the world’s focus to only a narrow sliver of those being trafficked. Press coverage of sordid situations and acute human suffering certainly contributed to the framing of human trafficking and, therefore, the solutions being proposed today to combat the phenomenon. Governments now see the issue as one of crime control and prevention (Musto, 8) rather than one that might seek to ameliorate the conditions in the third world from which traffickers and the West profits. But our focus here, I remind myself, is not the normative or subjective aspects of our issues, but rather on how our issues made their way onto the global agenda and its implications. I would therefore like to close by pointing out that the way an agenda gets shaped by NGOs and the press and how that gets interpreted by powerful states conditions to a great extent the framing of the issue, who adopts it, and the division of labor among global actors combating the problems it exposes.