A computational analysis of human rights discourse in news media using institutional theory

Abstract

Introduction News coverage of politically sensitive events involves framing choices that accumulate across thousands of headlines, years, and media institutions. Likewise, no single reader or journalist can track these patterns as they happen. This study examines how English-language news media framed Rodrigo Duterte's anti-drug campaign in the Philippines from June 2016 to June 2025. Methods The study applies BERTopic topic modeling and VADER sentiment analysis to 1,133 headlines collected through Google News's RSS endpoint. Institutional Theory organizes the results around three pressures: normative, coercive, and mimetic. Results Ten topic clusters emerged from the corpus, centered on human rights violations, International Criminal Court (ICC) legal proceedings, and post-presidency accountability narratives. Domestic Philippine outlets covered human rights themes in a larger share of headlines than international outlets during the campaign's early years, but that pattern reversed after Duterte left office in 2022. By 2024 and 2025, international outlets covered human rights themes in roughly 64 percent of headlines, compared with about half for domestic outlets. Sentiment analysis classified 807 headlines as negative, 203 as neutral, and 123 as positive. Negative coverage rose sharply in early 2025, around Duterte's arrest on an ICC warrant. Headline language also clustered around three institutional events: the 2018 ICC filing, the 2020 United Nations (UN) Human Rights Report, and the 2021 ICC investigation authorization, each marked by distinct word patterns across positive, negative, and neutral coverage. Discussion Normative pressure explains why domestic outlets led on human rights framing before any international body had acted. Coercive pressure from the ICC and UN corresponds to the sentiment spikes around each event. Mimetic pressure explains how framing conventions moved between domestic and international outlets over time, first from domestic to international sources and later in the other direction. The study also considers how Google News's own curation choices shape which outlets and frames appear in the corpus. These findings suggest computational analysis is both a research method and a way to hold a media record open to scrutiny after the news cycle moves on.