Scholarship on international human rights generally adopts two approaches. The normative approach focuses on treaties or other authoritative sources. The institutional approach emphasises governments, organisations or other actors charged with the norms' implementation. Much writing inevitably involves both approaches. Any critical stance is then often limited either to examining obstacles within the norms or their interpretation, or to pointing out the shortcomings of actors responsible for implementation.
The authors of human rights scholarship are often activists, lawyers, diplomats or judges, and may include scholars with professional affinities to those circles. They largely confine their critical scope to those normative or institutional levels. Some theoretical writings go further, proposing broader frameworks, such as liberal, legal-realist, post-Marxist, post-colonial, feminist, communitarian or deconstructionist. Those analyses too, however, frequently focus either on prevailing norms (individually or as a system) or on the performance of the relevant actors.
In this chapter, I shall examine a third layer of activity, the mass media. I shall treat the media as being on a par with, or more powerful than, the dominant systems of norms, insofar as the media determine the situations with which those norms are associated in the public mind; and as being at least on a par with organisations and governments, insofar as the media determine which situations are most visibly and urgently acted upon. The neglect of this decisive strand underscores the ongoing formalism of legal practice: norms and institutions receive the most attention, since they assume the official status proper to the promulgation, interpretation and implementation of rights. In most scholarship on international law and human rights, the role of the media, lacking any such formalised status, is cited, if at all, only tangentiallyMost human rights scholarship remains highly formalist, with a focus on norms and institutions. However, at least as powerful as, if not more powerful than, those norms and institutions, are the mass media. Consonant with David Kennedy’s concern that rights discourse can privilege some interests at the expense of others, the media must be seen as the force that overwhelmingly decides which norms and abuses count, and which are neglected. Public consciousness of human rights emerges not out of political reality, but out of a media-generated ‘hyper-reality’, impermeable to some of the world’s most heinous abuses. The media remain immune from the values of even-handedness that are conceptually presupposed by human rights law. In principle, human rights shun any zero-sum game, whereby the rights of one person or group may be traded off against those of another. The media not only plays that game, but must play it, as a matter of sheer time and resources. A ‘Hollywoodisation’ of rights still further contributes to forging a hyper-reality that remains at odds with the realities of global human rights
