A Baseline for Further Analysis: News Media Coverage and Levels of U.S. Development Aid

Abstract

The responsiveness argument presented in chapter 2 leads to the expectation that aid bureaucracies will try to roughly match the levels of aid they offer with their perception of the domestic political importance of the recipient. The news media content provides a simple, clear and easily accessible indicator of that importance and, as a result, it is expected that aid bureaucracies will respond to the content of the news media by matching development aid allocations with levels of coverage. Whether or not there actually is a relationship between the news media and the allocation of foreign aid is an empirical question that needs to be explored through careful and extensive testing. However, it is not necessarily a simple question and there is no single analysis that can easily provide a definite answer.To provide an empirical foundation for further argument and study, this chapter presents the first of several analyses of a variety of aid programs from throughout the world.