How The News Affects Foreign Aid Flows

In foreign affairs, aid allocation is among the most frequently and intensely debated aspects of Western intervention in underdeveloped countries. Types of aid vary from charitable humanitarian relief to the more common forms of aid, including direct cash transfers, weapons, livestock, and even technical training on policy-making or business ownership and development. Furthermore, aid can be given bilaterally (directly from a donor country to a recipient country) or multilaterally (from a donor agency such as the World Bank, funded by donations from private individuals and donor countries).

In the early stages of foreign aid, post-WWII foreign aid had the singular goal of bringing post-war Europe out of debt through massive injections of US dollars, virtually just a donation from the US to the recipient country. Aid remained in this altruistic form until the 1980s, which is known as the era of “structural adjustment,” meaning that the US, instead of just donating money abroad, was now becoming involved in recipient country government structures by attaching conditionalities to aid. This period also marked the height of the Cold War and America’s battle to expand its sphere of influence worldwide. For example, if the US wants to give money to a country with a poor economy and poor human rights policy and that is in a position to be influenced by Soviet communism, the US will give aid with the condition that the recipient country will enact economic and human rights policy reform while having governmental structures influenced, and promoting democracy. Conditionality changes the purpose of aid from one that is purely focused on allowing people in recipient countries to decide how to use foreign aid given to them to one that is focused on return on investment for the donors and pleasing stakeholders of both bilateral and multilateral aid agencies.

One of the most important stakeholders that donor countries are supporting is the taxpayers who fund foreign aid budgets through taxes. Taxpayers, for the most part, do not have extensive knowledge of overseas issues beyond what they see in the news. This means that the amount of news coverage an international crisis gets has a massive effect on what issues become perceived as most important and, thus, what issues become most important to distributors of aid; this process has been coined “sudden-onset national news effect” (Scott, Bunce, and Wright 2021). The sudden-onset national news effect has been proven to cause misperceptions of issue salience, making less frequent and less deadly events, such as volcano eruptions and earthquakes, seem far more salient than more frequent crises such as droughts and floods (Eisensee and Strömberg, 2007). 

We can observe these biases towards certain disaster types and regions in the expansive literature on news coverage’s effect on aid. Thomas Esensee and David Strömberg highlight that for every person killed in a volcano disaster, 40,000 people must die in a drought to reach the same probability of media coverage” (Eisensee and Strömberg 2007). Regionally news coverage favors certain areas over others, Eisensee and Strömberg write, “it requires forty times as many killed in an African disaster to achieve the same expected media coverage as for a disaster in Eastern Europe of similar type and magnitude” (Eisensee and Strömberg 2007). Donor countries are highly reactive to the news regarding how they allocate aid to avoid scrutiny and sanctions from elected officials, who, themselves, have to meet the demands of the public to get reelected (Joly, 2014). This skewed perception of disaster frequency and importance leads to a skewed distribution of aid. Although all disasters should undoubtedly be responded to with foreign aid, misperceptions of which ones are causing the most deaths are causing aid to go to those who are not most in need. Furthermore, we see this problem is also one of bias as certain types of disasters (volcanoes and earthquakes) and countries or regions that receive lots of US aid are covered more in the news (Cohen, Riffe, and Kim 2021). This means aid is not as effectively distributed as it could or should be, and not every country has an equal opportunity to get news coverage. This disadvantages some of the world’s poorest countries, given that if any disaster’s probability of being covered in the news is below 10%, then that country also has a 10% probability of receiving any aid (Eisensee and Strömberg 2007).

These statistics pose severe threats and show how false perceptions of issue salience can lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. Although the news is beneficial for providing coverage of the most recent disasters worldwide, it also causes misperceptions to arise due to bias through disproportionate coverage of countries the US gives more aid to while also misrepresenting what types of disasters occur most often. Furthermore, those in charge of aid distribution act in self-interest when deciding where to and where not to allocate aid, paying close attention to the news, so they can say, “We are on top of this,” to the American taxpayers who use the news to inform them on international issues (Scott, Bunce, and Wright 2021). In reality, they are not acting altruistically by catching every disaster, but they selectively choose the disasters that are in the public eye and respond to those. In a political system based on being reelected, they aren’t really on top of their game, instead failing massively to give aid where it is needed, and in the process, causing the deaths of thousands of people every year.

References

Joly, J. 2014. “Do the Media Influence Foreign Aid Because or in Spite of the Bureaucracy? A Case Study of Belgian Aid Determinants.” Political Communication 31: 584–603.

Thomas Eisensee, David Strömberg, News Droughts, News Floods, and U. S. Disaster Relief, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 122, Issue 2, May 2007, Pages 693–728, https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.122.2.693.

Scott, M., Bunce, M., & Wright, K. (2021). The Influence of News Coverage on Humanitarian Aid: The Bureaucrats’ Perspective. Journalism Studies, 23(2), 167–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2021.2013129.

Sobel Cohen, M., Riffe, D., & Kim, S. (2021). Media and money: a 50-year analysis of international news coverage and U.S. foreign aid. The Journal of International Communication, 27(2), 172–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/13216597.2021.1929391.