Does news coverage really make a material difference to the amount of humanitarian aid a crisis receives? Or are we confusing correlation with causation? At a time when donor funding is failing to keep pace with rapidly escalating levels of humanitarian need, these are important questions. The answers can help ensure humanitarian assistance gets to where it is most needed.
To answer these questions, our team of researchers from the University of East Anglia, City, University of London and the University of Edinburgh interviewed 30 senior bureaucrats tasked with making policy about the allocation of humanitarian aid. They worked for 16 governments representing democratic countries with the largest humanitarian aid budgets. The results have recently been published in Journalism Studies.
