ECREA16-Abstract

Thursday, November 10

1 6 : 3 0 – 1 8 : 0 0

CDE08

Media, Campaigning and Public Debate

PP 239

Top-Down Human Rights and Bottom-Up Citizenship: The Scope of Democratic Debate on Human Rights Practices in Mainstream

and Alternative News Media

R. Reul

University of Antwerp, Communication Sciences, Antwerp, Belgium

This study examines in what way media coverage contributes to broadening or limiting democratic debate on human rights practices. The potential role

of news media for communication about and mobilisation against human rights violations has long been a topic of academic interest, but rarely more

potent than now. It appears that contemporary human rights culture is fraught with destabilising geopolitical developments, international political discord,

and civic apathy. Amnesty International’s 2015/16 report on the condition of human rights paints a bleak picture, attributing a “global assault on people’s

basic freedoms”to political inadequacy and deliberate governmental defiance of long-standing international laws and provisions. Human rights discourse

also seems to have faded to the margins of national political debate and policy, and civic engagement and mobilisation appears at times severely lacking.

The suggested political disinclination and civic indifference towards the international human rights system is surprising, as human rights in principle and

in practice have long been articulated as a matter of near-universal consensus. Normative expectations about the news media’s social and political respon‑

sibility in democratic society lead us to question whether news coverage allows for enough space in contemporary (counter-)public spheres for a broad

democratic debate on the handling of human rights issues. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine the scope of ideological assumptions underlying

news coverage of human rights issues. A quantitative and qualitative content analysis is carried out to examine reporting on human rights issues from 2002

to 2015 in the Belgian quality newspapers De Standaard and De Morgen, and the alternative outlets DeWereld Morgen and Mo*Magazine. We first analyse

the themes and subjects associated with human rights as a principle and in practice. Next, we look at the actors that are given epistemic authority, and

those that are not. Finally, we analyse the arguments that are presented in news media discourses and the scope of the potential discussion on human rights

practices. Preliminary results show that coverage of ‘human rights’ as a topic has been steadily declining in both mainstream newspapers since the peaks

in interest at the beginning of the decade, when international human rights codification and legalisation were also at a high. Additionally, even though

‘human rights’covers a wide variety of topics, international legal issues such as privacy legislation or international political responses to urgent geopolitical

disturbances seem to be of great concern in contemporary human rights discourse. Discussion of human rights issues in terms of national policy or civic

engagement are few and far between. This research argues that the predicament of human rights culture partly stems from the top-down demarcation

of democratic debate on human rights practices, whereby existing power relations and procedures have been naturalised, and civic influence and respon‑

sibility is conventionalized as necessarily limited. This paper finishes by discussing the implications of the seeming consensus on internationalised human

rights practice for the concept of democratic citizenship.

PP 240

The Role of the Media in the Formation of the Public Debate on Education in Greece: A Preliminary Research from the Perspective

of the Systemic Theory

E. Angelakou

, A. Kodakos

University of the Aegean, Department of Sciences of Preschool Education and Educational Design, Rhodes, Greece

Whatever we know about our society or, to put it differently, about the world in which we live, is known by the media. Reviewing the relevant bibliography,

it is noted that the issue of the influence of the media on the formation of the public opinion and the preparation of changes/reversals has been studied

adequately. The media and ICT are organizations, which intend to inform, entertain and advertise (economy) with all the typical characteristics of a system

that serves general and specific organizational goals or interests. As a result, the depiction of the reality, that is, the information is framed by evident and

uncertain messages. Going through a period of crisis, rapid, radical changes were noted in Greece in the educational system. The role the media played

was determinative, as far as these changes are concerned. Whatever they broadcast and the way they did it changed the structure and morality of the area

of the educational function, influencing the public opinion and making it receptive to the frequent appalling changes. In this paper, the research interest

focuses on the depiction and presentation of issues of public interest in and by the media. The purpose of this research is the communicative analysis

of the media contents, in order to highlight the uncertain communicative intentions following the example of the presentation of the educational system

issues, through theTheory of Social Systems by N. Luhmann. For N. Luhmann, the media have evolved in a separate sector of a process of "ultimate differen‑

tiation”on the basis of "conception" of the specific forms of information dissemination technology. In fact, because their function is to guide the self-obser‑

vation of the social system, he refers to the autonomy of the media in the control of selectivity itself. The media themselves select and deal with what have

an issue in the communication itself.Therefore, the research hypothesis that emerged and was put to check is that the reproduction mode of the educational

reality by the media is done consciously in a wrong way preparing the public for the upcoming interventions in the educational system. Thus, this research

seeks to detect, assess and compare the reports of printed forms, electronic - audiovisual and digital media in education in their true/uncertain intention

and the social and political representation / expression. For the conduct of this paper, 50 researchers attended wide ranging forms of print, electronic and

digital media for three months, using the method of observation and as a technique the communication content analysis in audio, visual and written data,

on the basis of a combined system of characteristic features and categories, using an observation sheet (clavicle). For the exploration of the views of dif‑

ferent groups (focus groups), meetings were held with citizens and teachers after the end of the research. The results of the research confirm the initial hy‑

pothesis and give stimuli for an in-depth discussion on the systemic conditions, the social function and the actual role of the media in modern democracies.