GLOBAL HUMANITARIANISM AND THE CHANGING AID-MEDIA FIELD

TLDR

Humanitarian agencies and the media have long interacted, but the relationship is evolving in ways that are not improving. This article investigates how major aid agencies’ communication strategies have adapted to the prevailing media logic, based on insights from their communications managers. NGOs now actively brand themselves, enlist celebrities, create tailored media packages, and invest resources to mitigate media‑related scandals. These practices entangle aid agencies in media dynamics, threatening their integrity, compromising communication goals, and endangering the ethics and mission of global humanitarianism.

Abstract

The crucial interaction between humanitarian agencies and the media has been researched in the past but today it continues to evolve and change—and not for the better. This article, drawing on accounts from communications managers working inside the world's major aid agencies (Red Cross, Oxfam, Save the Children, World Vision, CARE and Médecins sans Frontières), examines how communication strategies designed to raise awareness, funds and support have assimilated to today's pervasive "media logic". In the increasingly crowded and competitive field of humanitarian agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) now seek to "brand" themselves in the media; they purposefully use celebrities and produce regionalized and personalized "media packages" to court media attention; and they reflexively expend time and resources warding off increased risks of mediated scandals. In such ways, aid agencies have become increasingly embroiled in the practices and predilections of the global media and can find their organizational integrity impugned and communication aims compromised. These developments imperil the very ethics and project of global humanitarianism that aid agencies historically have done so much to promote.