Human Rights and the Media

This week we were fortunate enough to have Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties, deliver our annual lecture. In her talk Common Values and the Human Rights Act she discussed the UK Human Rights Act’s (HRA) antecedents and defends it against some of the criticisms that are made against it.

One of the points she made is that the dominant media narrative about the HRA is it only benefits two groups of people; firstly the super wealthy who can afford to use it to protect their privacy, for example. The second group is at the other end of the social scale, asylum seekers and criminals, the most destitute and perhaps also the most despised, who are among the very few people able to access legal aid and therefore able to invoke the Act’s protection. In the absence of any alternative media story, she argued, it is no surprise that this piece of legislation has become reviled in certain quarters.

She went onto cite research carried out on Liberty’s behalf by polling organisation ComRes that found that most people are almost universally in favour of the rights set out in the HRA. This she argued could be the result of two things; firstly that it is easy to be in favour of rights in relation to ourselves, less so in relation to despised others. Secondly that there is a gap in the knowledge of many people about who and what the HRA act is for. She implied that more needed to be done to educate people about human rights, in order to counter the almost always negative claims made about them and the people they are seen to benefit.

As she discussed this I was reminded of the need to educate people about something else: the role of the media. I am a graduate in the much maligned subject of Media and Cultural Studies. My Master’s was in Politics and the Mass Media and my current doctoral research is being supervised within a Media and Cultural Studies Department. I am therefore clearly biased about the value of studying the media and the need for developing people’s media literacy. I think it is vital that as part of developing an educated citizenry we teach people about their shared rights, as Ms Chakrabarti discussed, as well as their responsibilities. Part of being an active citizen is being informed about what is happening around and to you. This means being aware of the need to question media narratives such as the one discussed in our annual lecture. I am not suggesting that people are cultural dupes, blindly believing and accepting the ideas fed to them by the media (indeed, I think my tutors past and present would wonder whether they had heard a word they said if I did!). However I think we all need to be reminded occasionally of the importance of seeking out different perspectives and of thinking about alternative explanations for why some events are covered in particular ways.

We are fortunate to have legislation that enables all people in this country to express their opinions and we are lucky to have people like Ms Chakrabarti who are prepared to fight for our right to do so. The least we can do is to ensure that we give a variety of those voices a fair hearing.

Annie Gosling

King George VI Fellow