The media frame a topic according to the news agenda’s prominence of the issue. The analysis conducted in this study will try to determine if American newspapers predominately frame human trafficking as women who are sexually exploited.
H1: American newspapers tend to cover the sex side of human trafficking rather than labor trafficking.
H2: Coverage of human trafficking is more about women than men in the United States.
Method
The research will consist of using content analysis to determine how newspapers in the United States are framing the issue of human trafficking. The analysis will include two regional, two national, and two local United States’ newspapers. Syntactical units, words or sentences, will be used for coding …show more content…
The TVPA caused human trafficking to become prominent within the news media. News coverage increased after the reauthorization Act of 2008. Human trafficking has become more prominent in the last five years; therefore, articles will be researched from 2010-2015.
American newspapers are the population that will be examined in this study. The multistage cluster sample will total 124 articles from six newspapers. There will be 25 articles taken from each national and regional newspaper, and 12 articles from each of the local newspapers. The number of local articles was decided upon due to most of their human trafficking coverage coming from the Associated Press.
The New York Times (national), USA Today (national), The LA Times (regional), and The Chicago-Sun Times (regional) are in Huffington Post’s top ten most circulated newspapers (Press, 2013). These four papers are going to be the sample set that shows how the most circulated publications are framing modern day slavery. For a more localized look at media framing, The Herald Journal (Spartanburg, SC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC) will be …show more content…
The media has largely contributed to one of the stereotypes of human trafficking: women are the only victims of human trafficking. Men are rarely mentioned in the slave trade. People are being led to believe that more women are captured over men and that the slave trade seems to the most lucrative out of human trafficking. The research will discover if women in the slave trade are called “victims,” depicting them as them as weak and easily manipulated. On the other hand, men could be portrayed as either being “forced into” or “slaves of” human trafficking. This study will determine if media only covers women as helpless entities and if the full scale of today’s slave trade is being