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Zurich, May 26th, 2010. The Beijing Olympic Games had a chilling effect on the coverage of the death penalty. When Amnesty International, the champion of the fight against capital punishment, publishes its Annual Report on Thursday, the media environment will have become less interested in human rights issues, as the global financial crisis dominates the headlines. Coverage of the death penalty and of executions dropped by more than 75% between 2007 and 2008 according to a long-term analysis by Media Tenor International, the Zurich-based research institute.

As China no longer publishes the number of executions, exact figures remain unknown. Amnesty International´s report on the death penalty only relates that China executes more people than all other countries together. Yet, despite this, news coverage focused on Iran over the last eleven months. “The contested election in Iran, the violent protests and the use of the death penalty to intimidate the opposition galvanized media attention in 2009/2010”, explains Dr. Christian Kolmer, Head of International Studies at Media Tenor International. “But overall reporting on capital punishment dropped significantly during the run-up to the Beijing Games. In the trade-off between an improved relationship with China and the espousal of human rights, capital punishment dropped from the international media agenda.”

Common news values shape the selection of important and unimportant issues in the case of the death penalty as well. Thus British news devoted the biggest share of reporting to capital punishment – but only because a British citizen was executed in Iran despite strong intervention by the British Government.

As the only Western country that adheres to capital punishment, the U.S. is in strange company, and even more so in the media. While the absolute number of executions in the U.S. stayed rather low in 2009, the country ranked third in the media; 15% of all stories about capital punishment referred to the United States. Japan escaped the media attention totally. “This is a bit discomforting with regard to the extraordinary high level of convictions in Japan”, Dr. Kolmer said.

As a broader perspective on human rights has been advocated by human rights activists - and many governments in developing countries as well - media interest on the core issue of capital punishment has slipped. “This hampers progress in the fight to abolish the death penalty”, concludes Dr. Kolmer.

Media Tenor International has been analyzing opinion-leading since 1994. This analysis is based on a long temr anaylsis of 736,364 stories in 29 media. For the years 2009/2010, 125,373 / 243,144 news stories in 36 / 40 international TV news programs have been analyzed in 36 / 40 international TV news programs.All media content has been analyzed by trained human coders. Average inter-coder reliability equaled 87% in the IV. quarter of 2009.

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