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News Frames and Story Triggers in the Media’s Coverage of Human Trafficking

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Abstract

Since 2000, there has been a flurry of policy activity to address the problem of human trafficking. A wide consensus has formed in most of the international community on the nature of the problem. However, there is considerable disagreement among scholars and activists over definitions and how best to address the problem. A content analysis of relevant articles in The New York Times and Washington Post between 1980 and 2006 reveals that media coverage has relied mostly on official sources and is framed in a way that has mirrored the dominant view of trafficking. This has helped legitimize the consensus among policymakers while marginalizing alternative views that also might be critical of official policy. This analysis also shows that articles initiated by investigative journalists are more likely to break away from the official frame and report alternative views than articles generated from traditional news beats.

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Notes

  1. The search criteria used was: (traffic!) w/3 (human or persons or women or girls or children or sex! or labor!). The “!” signifies a wild card. In this case, Lexis would search for articles with the term traffic or trafficking. The “w/3” instructs Lexis to include articles where the second term is within three characters of the first term.

  2. Additional themes included in the content analysis were issue focus (i.e., sex trafficking vs. other forms of trafficking) and country focus. Because of the space limitations, the findings for issue and country focus are not presented here, but can be found in a longer version of the manuscript at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1633572.

  3. After extensive pre-testing by me and my research assistants, two assistants divided the articles roughly in half and were then responsible for coding those articles. The articles were coded once more by the author. When there were disagreements between me and a coder, it was typically for the questions asking about sources, causes, and solutions. Rather than choose from the list of options provided, coders tended to write-out answers in open-ended form. I performed the coding of open-ended responses and collapsed them into the choices already provided.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Courtney Somerville and Katelyn Hoover for their conscientious and thorough work on the content analysis; the Valente Center for Arts and Sciences at Bentley University for their research support; and Joseph Swingle, Ira Silver, Mary Marcel, and my colleagues at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (http://www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/isht/index.php) for their constructive feedback and moral support.

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  1. Bentley University, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA, 02452, USA

    Girish J. Gulati

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Correspondence to Girish J. Gulati.

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Gulati, G.J. News Frames and Story Triggers in the Media’s Coverage of Human Trafficking. Hum Rights Rev 12, 363–379 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-010-0184-5

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