College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Permanent URI for this community
Browse
Browsing College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences by Subject "media freedom"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item The Correlates of Media Freedom: An Introduction of the Global Media Freedom Dataset(Political Science Research and Methods, 2015-12-02) Whitten-Woodring, Jenifer; Van Belle, Douglas A.Media freedom has motivated substantial political activism, yet there are surprising gaps in the related academic literature, in part because of a lack of historic and consistent data. We introduce the newly expanded Global Media Freedom Dataset, which includes 196 countries from 1948 to 2012, and demonstrate how it can be used to test previous hypotheses and assumptions about the correlates of media freedom.Item News about her: The effects of media freedom and internet access on women's rights(Routledge, 2016-09-08) Whitten-Woodring, JeniferHuman rights organizations have long heralded media freedom as critical to holding government accountable and thereby improving a wide range of human rights. Similarly the Internet and social media are assumed to empower citizens by enabling them to document repression and thereby discourage future abuse. So what does this mean for women’s rights? I propose that, when it comes to women’s rights, the combination of media freedom and Internet access will make a difference and that the effect of media freedom will depend on Internet access. I test my hypotheses across countries and over time and find that the interaction of Internet access and media freedom has positive effects on women’s rights regardless of regime type.Item Watchdog or Lapdog? Media Freedom, Regime Type, and Government Respect for Human Rights(International Studies Quarterly, 2009) Whitten-Woodring, JeniferA main justification for press freedom is that free media will act as a watchdog over the government. While we would expect democracies to have free media and autocracies to have government-controlled media, some democracies have government-controlled media, and some autocracies have free media. How this mismatch between regime type and media system influences government behavior is a puzzle worth exploring. One of the most widely criticized government behaviors is the violation of physical integrity rights. The question posed here is, how does media freedom affect government respect for these rights? In this article, I theorize that the relationship between media freedom and government respect for human rights differs, depending on the presence of democratic institutions. The findings support my premise. Specifically, the influence of media freedom on government respect for human rights is negative for the most autocratic regimes and positive for only the most democratic regimes.