World Report 2011 - Human Rights Watch

WORLD REPORT 20111 Martin Moore, Shrinking World: The decline of international reporting in the Britishpress (London: Media Standards Trust, November 2010), p 17. The study looked at foreignstories appearing in the first ten pages of four major daily newspapers.2 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: Directorate for Science,Technology and Industry Committee for Information, Computer, and CommunicationsPolicy, “The Evolution of News and the Internet,” June 11, 2010http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/30/24/45559596.pdf (accessed November 20, 2010),p.7. The steepest declines were registered in the United States, the United Kingdom,Greece, Italy, Canada, and Spain.3 This essay focuses primarily on NGOs that do research and advocacy in multiple countriesand therefore interact regularly with journalists who cover one country for audiencesin another. Most of these remarks concern NGOs working on human rights andother social justice issues, rather than, for example, global warming and the environment,although they face some of the same challenges.4 The four were actually convicted of torture that was revealed in another, unrelatedvideo. See “Indonesia: Investigate Torture Video From Papua,” Human Rights Watchnews release, October 20, 2010, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/10/20/indonesiainvestigate-torture-video-papua.5 Human Rights Watch, Torture Redux: The Rivival of Physical Coercion duringInterrogations in Bahrain, February 8, 2010,http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2010/02/08/torture-redux6 Pamela Constable, “Demise of the Foreign Correspondent,” The Washington Post,February 18, 2007.7 John Maxwell Hamilton, Journalism’s roving eye: a history of American foreign reporting(Lousiana State University Press, 2010), p. 457.8 “Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and InformationRevolutions: What Americans Know: 1989-2007,” The Pew Research Center for the People& the Press, April 15, 2007 http://people-press.org/report/319/public-knowledge-of-current-affairs-little-changed-by-news-and-information-revolutions(accessed November 29,2010).9 Richard Wray, “Media Consumption on the Increase,” The Guardian, April 19, 2010http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/19/media-consumption-survey(accessed November 21, 2010).10 See, for example, the Temasek Review in Singapore; Malaysiakini and other onlineportals in Malaysia; numerous Vietnamese bloggers; and the Democratic Voice of Burmaand Mizzima, among others.34