NGOs as Newsmakers

The Changing Landscape of International News

Matthew Powers

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780231545754
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

As traditional news outlets' international coverage has waned, several prominent nongovernmental organizations have taken on a growing number of seemingly journalistic functions. Groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Médecins Sans Frontières send reporters to gather information and provide analysis and assign photographers and videographers to boost the visibility of their work. Digital technologies and social media have increased the potential for NGOs to communicate directly with the public, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. But have these efforts changed and expanded traditional news practices and coverage—and are there consequences to blurring the lines between reporting and advocacy?

In NGOs as Newsmakers, Matthew Powers analyzes the growing role NGOs play in shaping—and sometimes directly producing—international news. Drawing on interviews, observations, and content analysis, he charts the dramatic growth in NGO news-making efforts, examines whether these efforts increase the organizations' chances of garnering news coverage, and analyzes the effects of digital technologies on publicity strategies. Although the contemporary media environment offers NGOs greater opportunities to shape the news, Powers finds, it also subjects them to news-media norms. While advocacy groups can and do provide coverage of otherwise ignored places and topics, they are still dependent on traditional media and political elites and influenced by the expectations of donors, officials, journalists, and NGOs themselves. Through an unprecedented glimpse into NGOs' newsmaking efforts, Powers portrays the possibilities and limits of NGOs as newsmakers amid the transformations of international news, with important implications for the intersections of journalism and advocacy.

CHAPTER ONE

A New Era of NGO-Driven News?

In 2010, the photographer Platon took an assignment that brought him to the border of Thailand and Myanmar.1 Then a photographer with the New Yorker magazine, Platon was paid by the Manhattan-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch to accompany a research team on a trip to the region. With elections coming later that year, Human Rights Watch wanted its researchers to gather the latest information on political repression in the country. Moreover, it wanted to relay that information to policy makers and relevant publics around the world in the hopes of generating a more robust international response to ongoing human rights violations committed by the government. Platon, Human Rights Watch believed, would prove useful to realizing the latter aim.

There on the border of Thailand and Myanmar, the group went about its double mission: researchers conducted interviews; Platon shot his photographs. Best known for his portraits of world leaders, Platon aimed to transfer the visual tactics of celebrity photography—soft frontal lighting, an absence of background or contextual imagery, a wide-angle lens centered solely on the subject’s face—to photographing a motley crew of political dissidents: Buddhist monks, land-mine victims, sex workers. Asked to describe his approach to the assignment, he answered that his aim was to put the facts and figures of Human Rights Watch’s reporting into terms that could render political dissidents half a world away accessible to Western audiences. “The project with Human Rights Watch,” he said, “is predominantly about humanizing their statistics” (Platon 2011).

When the research team returned to New York, Human Rights Watch officials went to the New Yorker offices with Platon’s photographs and a pitch. The magazine could use the photographs free of charge, but with a single stipulation: Human Rights Watch wanted, after a brief embargo, to send the images to other news outlets, too. According to a Human Rights Watch official, the New Yorker editors were keen to use the images. Platon, after all, was their photographer; the issue, given upcoming elections in Myanmar was both newsworthy and underreported; and the financial cost to the publication of using the photographs was nonexistent. The proposal seemed like a win–win.

Yet the New Yorker staff had some concerns of their own. Who would get credit for the images—Platon or Human Rights Watch? Whose story was it, ultimately? Would other outlets’ use of the same photographs diminish the cultivated and unique style of journalism that the New Yorker sought to project of itself? Both parties felt to a certain extent to be entering unchartered waters. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, unfamiliarity carried with it an undertone of anxiety concerning each other’s motivations. This anxiety came to a head at one point in the negotiations when David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, asked a Human Rights Watch official outright whether the organization was going to turn around right away and give the photographs to Time magazine.

The official assured Remnick that Human Rights Watch had no such intention. In fact, Human Rights Watch in this instance cared little about the American audience. American foreign policy toward Myanmar, in its view, was excellent. What it did care about was the prestige of being in the New Yorker. This prestige, organization officials assumed, would make other news outlets in countries where the group sought to change policy toward Myanmar—India, Japan, South Africa, and others—more likely to use the photographs and to draw attention to its accompanying report. It might also, they acknowledged, catch the eyes of the organization’s donor base, which tended to read publications such as the New Yorker.

Fears assuaged, the New Yorker published the photographs in print and online.2 And Human Rights Watch in turn later sent the images to news outlets in target countries around the world in the hopes of opening doors to government officials in countries where those doors had previously been closed. Months after their publication, the deputy director of external relations at Human Rights Watch told me that the photographs had reached more people around the world, in more places the organization wanted to be, than any other information product the group had ever made—be it a research report, a press release, or an online feature.3 And yet when asked whether the publicity yielded real-world impact—that is, whether government officials in India, Japan, and South Africa changed their country’s position toward Myanmar—the official acknowledged that it was hard to know.

In many ways, the Platon project was a logical extension of the advocacy work that Human Rights Watch has long conducted. Founded in 1978, the group has from its earliest days used on-the-ground reporting to identify human rights violations around the world.4 In the 1980s, for example, the group regularly sent researchers to various countries in Central America to document war crimes by government and rebel groups (Neier 2003). Moreover, interaction with journalists has always been central to the group’s “naming and shaming” strategy.5 This strategy, which asserts that human rights violators can be publicly pressured into improving their human rights practices, relies crucially on the news media to publicize its findings. Seen from this vantage point, the Platon project simply used digital communication to amplify Human Rights Watch’s existing work and reach a more global audience.

In other ways, though, Human Rights Watch’s project with Platon signals a broader transformation in how the group conducts research and pursues publicity. With four hundred staff members, the group is able to conduct on-the-ground reporting in a far wider range of countries and on a broader array of human rights topics than it could with the approximately ten staffers it had for much of the 1980s. And with a larger budget, the group is able to hire journalists and photographers, such as Platon, who can produce materials that are likely to attract journalists’ attention. Finally, digital technologies diversify the range of publicity options that groups such as Human Rights Watch have at their disposal. These groups can use existing media organizations, such as the New Yorker, to attract attention; however, they can also publish materials on their own websites and social media feeds in order to better achieve their advocacy aims. Seen from this vantage point, the Platon project is not simply an extension of past practices but also part of a larger growth and diversification of those practices that makes Human Rights Watch a key participant in the production of contemporary human rights news.

This transformation is not limited to Human Rights Watch. In recent years, a number of leading international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have ramped up their communication efforts. Amnesty International, which has long conducted reporting around the world, now staffs a “news unit” charged with being the online portal for human rights news (Bartlett 2011). Oxfam sends “firefighter” reporters to gather information and provide analysis in the midst of humanitarian emergencies (Cooper 2009). Médecins Sans Frontières contracts with photojournalists to boost the visibility of its advocacy efforts both in the mass media and online (Powers 2016a). In these and related instances, NGOs play an increasingly crucial role in shaping and in some cases directly producing news coverage about some of the most pressing humanitarian and human rights issues of our time.

This book provides an in-depth examination of the communication efforts by these and other leading humanitarian and human rights organizations. Drawing on interviews, field observations, and longitudinal content analysis, it charts the dramatic growth in these organizations’ communication efforts, examines whether these efforts increase the organizations’ chances of garnering news coverage, and analyzes the role of digital technologies in shaping the organizations’ choice of publicity strategies. It asks why these groups pursue the communication strategies they do and investigates how journalistic norms and practices structure the news media’s reception of these efforts. Finally, it details the consequences of these developments for the types of humanitarian and human rights news that citizens receive.

At its core, this book argues that the growth of NGO communication is a double-edged sword for both advocacy organizations and the public that consumes the information they produce. On the one hand, such efforts diversify the news. As the Human Rights Watch case suggests, the increased resources these groups commit to publicity means that they are more likely to appear in the news today than they were in the past. News consumers are thus exposed to a wider range of institutional voices, and at least sometimes these voices contrast with the views expressed by the government and business elites who have long dominated the news agenda. Moreover, NGOs can and do use digital tools to strategically shape news coverage in ways that seek to maximize their organizational objectives, as Human Rights Watch did by targeting its publicity to news media in countries where policy needed, in its view, to be changed.

On the other hand, these efforts also have costs. In their quest to garner publicity, NGOs adapt to news norms that give journalists and government officials the upper hand in defining what counts as news. This means that although advocacy groups produce information about a broad range of topics from a large number of countries, they tend to appear in places that the news media are covering and speak on issues in which the news media are already interested. Moving the media spotlight to Myanmar, as Human Rights Watch did, is thus an important exception, not an emergent rule. Moreover, despite the potential to use digital technologies to circumvent these patterns of control, NGO use of such tools centers primarily around interacting with journalists and protecting the NGOs’ own organizational credibility. Exploring alternative forms of public engagement—using, for example, social media to bypass the news media and directly target relevant stakeholders—is an aim that proves secondary at best.

Beyond documenting the mixed effects of NGO communication efforts, this book also offers an explanation for this state of affairs. It argues that advocacy groups see communication as both a way to garner credibility as actors in international politics and a means to raise the funds—either directly (through public donations) or indirectly (via branding)—that are necessary for their survival and growth. NGOs hire journalists in part to help achieve these dual aims, and these journalists bring a news-making sensibility to advocacy organizations. Although the development of such sensibilities boosts these organizations’ overall chances of garnering news coverage, it also ensures that advocacy groups produce information that largely accords with rather than challenges media preferences. Donors, government officials, and news organizations—each in different ways and for distinct reasons—further reinforce these tendencies by incentivizing NGOs to focus their efforts primarily on appearing in the mainstream news media. As a result, advocacy groups play less attention to using digital technologies, which might cultivate alternative forms of public engagement.

On the whole, then, this book portrays a news landscape that both offers NGOs greater opportunities to shape the news and subjects them to long-held norms of news construction. It illustrates how the expectations of donors, government officials, and journalists help to create this state of affairs and how these expectations lead advocacy groups to devote considerable resources to publicity, despite uncertainty as to whether these efforts aid in achieving their advocacy aims. Finally, it explains how the very uptake in communication efforts by NGOs helps to reproduce news norms that might otherwise be expected to change as a consequence of the legacy news media’s diminished international footprint.

THE CHANGING CONTEXTS OF NGO COMMUNICATION

The growth and diversification of NGO communication have arisen amid dramatic changes in journalism, advocacy, politics, and technology. In journalism, diminished revenues and intensified profitability expectations have led many North American and western European news organizations to reduce the resources they commit to international news gathering, while the rise of satellite and online news providers has diversified the number of globally oriented news organizations. In advocacy, the professionalization of activism, the growth of the organized advocacy sector, and that sector’s incorporation into governance have led NGOs to increase the amount and types of information they produce. In politics, public skepticism toward government has led many to view NGOs as credible sources of information and potential organizers for political action. Finally, the growth of digital technologies has expanded the landscape of public communication by diversifying the number of voices in the public sphere. Together, these changes have created the context in which it has become possible to explore transformations in NGOs’ communication efforts.6

For much of the latter part of the twentieth century, international news was a prestigious, if costly, type of coverage for news organizations to provide (Hamilton 2009). In both North America and western Europe, print newspapers and television stations maintained sizeable foreign-news bureaus, and assignments within these bureaus were prized positions reserved for highly regarded reporters (Hess 1996; Sambrook 2010). As news audiences have fragmented and advertising revenues have tumbled in recent years, news organizations have cut back on the number of foreign-news bureaus they maintain and full-time correspondents they employ (Carroll 2007; Kumar 2011).7 In the latter’s place, freelance reporters and parachute journalists are increasingly common, as are satellite and online-only news providers (Hannerz 2004; Reese 2010; Sambrook 2010; Volkmer 2014).8 These developments diversify the total number of news providers, but many remain skeptical as to whether they can offset the losses stemming from legacy media cutbacks. Thus, although scholars have long critiqued international news coverage as ethnocentric (Galtung and Ruge 1965; Gans 1979), today many wonder how news organizations—whether legacy, satellite, or online—will be able to monitor international affairs with their own network of correspondents. This situation informs what anthropologist Ulf Hannerz calls the “paradox” of contemporary international news: “In an era of intense globalizations, foreign news coverage in many media channels has recently been shrinking” (2004, 23).

At the same time, as news media have experienced these massive changes, NGOs have undergone transformations that have led them to increase both the amount and the types of information they produce. For starters, they have become institutionalized—that is, established as durable organizations rather than remaining ephemeral volunteer efforts (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Lang 2013). This institutionalization requires NGOs to produce a wide range of information materials—reports, policy statements, press releases, and so forth—for a diverse array of stakeholders that includes donors, government officials, and journalists. These groups have also professionalized. Their staff—whether researchers, advocacy officers, or communication professionals—are competitively hired in part for their capacity to produce these information materials (Powers 2016a). Finally, as the number of NGOs has grown, the whole sector has become more competitive as individual groups compete for limited funds and public attention (Cottle and Nolan 2007). Each organization therefore dedicates growing resources to managing its “brand” by maximizing its chances for positive publicity while minimizing its negative exposure (Orgad 2013). Together, these changes mean that NGOs today produce more—and more types of—information for a wider range of audiences than they did in the past.

Amid changes in journalism and advocacy, the political contexts in which both entities operate has also changed. Across western Europe and North America, notions of citizenship have expanded from infrequent participation in the political process via voting to perpetual efforts by NGOs, among other civil society actors, to hold governments—and, perhaps to a lesser degree, businesses—accountable for their actions (Bennett 2003; Friedland 1996; Rosanvallon 2008; Scammell 2014; Schudson 2015). These efforts span the gamut from street-based protests, which NGOs help organize, to advisory government fora, in which NGOs participate. These changes have led NGOs to interact more regularly with government and business officials, whether in providing services or reporting on key social issues (Lang 2013; Volkmer 2014). Beyond these interactions and in the midst of public skepticism toward government action, many view NGOs as both trusted sources of information and potential organizers of political action (Castells 2009; Lang 2013). On the whole, then, changes in politics appear simultaneously to give official legitimation to NGOs—that is, to include them within the range of official viewpoints—and perhaps to decenter government officials as the primary authority on certain topics.

Changes in technology cut across these transformations. Digital technologies potentially reshape the landscape of public communication by diversifying the tools available for producing and disseminating information. The relatively low costs associated with digital technologies make it possible for advocacy groups to produce their own audio-visual materials and to monitor issues of interest online (McPherson 2015). Sizeable budgets also give NGOs the resources to utilize more costly technologies, such as satellite imaging, to inform their reporting efforts (Aday and Livingston 2009). Furthermore, if NGOs were once reliant on the news media for visibility, today these groups have at their disposal a range of tools through which they can try to cultivate different forms of public attention (Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Chadwick 2013). Across all these settings, NGOs compete with other information-producing organizations—including businesses and governments, which often marshal far greater material and symbolic resources (Davis 2002)—for attention.

Taken together, these changing contexts raise the questions that this book seeks to answer: Do NGOs enjoy greater publicity today than they did in the past? How and in what ways do these groups use...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. A New Era of NGO-Driven News?
• 2. The Changing Faces of NGO Communication Work
• 3. The Partially Opening News Gates
• 4. The Strategic Advocate in the Digital Storm
• 5. Publicity’s Ends
• 6. Explaining the Endurance of News Norms
• 7. The Possibilities and Limitations of NGO Communication
• Methods Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index