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“They Offer You a Feature on Stockings and Suspenders Next to a Call for Stiffer Penalties for Sex Offenders”: Do We Learn More About the Media Than about Human Rights from Tabloid Coverage of Human Rights Stories?
Last month, in responding to a letter from the House of Lords EU Justice Sub-Committee about references to the ECHR in the Political Declaration, the Government failed to give assurances that it will not repeal or replace the Human Rights Act. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice simply re-asserted the 2017 manifesto pledge, not to do so while Brexit is underway: it was right that we “wait until the process of leaving the EU concludes before considering the matter further in the full knowledge of the new constitutional landscape.” The letter, from 4th January, is here. As the Sub-Committee pointed out, this is in stark contrast to its proclaimed commitment to ‘shared values of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms’.
Fully leaving the EU – in March 2021, if there is a two-year transition – then brings the double whammy, removal of EU Charter rights, and the possibility of revamping and dilution of the HRA. The Government did confirm its commitment to the ECHR, setting out that there no plans to withdraw from the ECHR. Whatever debates are to be had over the HRA – its operative scheme or its scope and extent – sensibly these should be informed. A new book – published this week, on 24th January, by Routledge – poses questions about the accuracy of media coverage. Human Rights in the Media: Fear and Fetish, edited by Michelle Farrell, Eleanor Drywood, and Edel Hughes stems from a conference organised by the School of Law and Social Justice at the University of Liverpool a few years ago on media coverage of human rights cases and issues. The content, including a chapter by me, are below:-
My chapter builds on some previous work, contained in this book, published by Hart in 2015, but includes two novel aspects. First, it offers a semiotic, Barthesian decoding of the following, by now infamous, red top front page, noting the way the paper portrays human rights as something not currently of value for individuals like you and me – all those on the right of the picture, the silent majority, are identified by first names (and ages) to facilitate that assimilation – but as something that protects people who are distinguished only by some collective shared criminal identity, necessarily demarcating them as outsiders, as having rejected society and its norms.
Secondly, it discusses the results of an empirical content study that I conducted into coverage by the Daily Mail of one, hotly contested human rights issue: the (non-)deportation of foreign criminals, following conviction, on human rights grounds. Of 35 stories in the paper over a two-year period about named, identifiable individuals, just over 88% of them showed them being able to avoid deportation – a success rate for the Home Secretary of just over 11%. Official Home Office data for an overlapping three-year period (admittedly now several years ago) showed almost the opposite: on average, the Home Secretary succeeded in 81% of such cases: in only 19% of cases was the FNO (foreign national offender) able to remain in the UK. At the time the chapter was written, The Sun and the Daily Mail had a combined readership of 3.3m, and the Mail Online 14.3m hits. It is a massive problem, one on which I gave evidence to the JCHR over the summer as part of its “Enforcing Human Rights” inquiry since it is not a problem that can easily be solved by a regulator. It is not that the reporting is inaccurate or false – does it conform to independent records? – but is rather, as the communications theorist Dennis McQuail put it, one of completeness: are the facts sufficient to constitute an adequate account? The chapter includes further empirical research on the (non-) reporting of ECHR judgments, as well as discussion of various techniques of distortion that I identified in that earlier book. These are pre-emption (reporting cases too early in their life cycle but portraying them as establishing a binding ruling); prominence; partiality (in sources); and phrasing of stories, alongside three new ones: lies, damned lies and statistics; repetition for reinforcement; and what I term an Unverfremdungseffekt, a reversal of Bertolt Brecht dramaturgical ideas about alienation. The chapter concludes that “the least the HRA deserves is a clean fair fight – not one encumbered by misreporting, misconception, and the misconstruction of reality.”