Determination Crisis: Media Effect Applies to Which Type of Aid? Development Aid, Humanitarian Assistance, or Food Aid.

Abstract

This paper adds to the growing body of knowledge in media and foreign aid. We aim to determine whether the impact of media-led US aid allocation applies universally to any foreign aid or specific to certain aid types. This paper's contribution is that we created three new media variables and use them to determine the strength of media effect on US Official Development Assistance (ODA), humanitarian assistance, and food aid. We generated the media variables from citations of an aid recipient's events in the four leading US daily newspapers' (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times) from 1966 to 2014. We used panel data fixed effects estimation technique on a dataset comprising 134 countries to determine the net strength of aid's media effect. Our findings showed that media's impact is ambiguous on the allocation of ODA. We found that the US ODA disbursement is unresponsive to media effect, whereas ODA commitment varies depending on the comparison's context. Media exposure is a critical factor for US humanitarian assistance and food aid disbursements.