Less in the West: The tangibility of international organizations and their media visibility around the world

Abstract

This paper presents the first theoretical and large-scale empirical account of the visibility of major global international organizations (IOs) in news media around the world. It focuses on the everyday, continuous coverage of IOs, through which knowledge and support of IOs can be built over time. Synthesizing insights from Media Studies and International Relations (IR), I develop a theoretical framework centered on the tangibility of IOs’ work—its concreteness and proximity to audiences—as the key driver of variation in IOs’ media visibility across states. Empirically, I study the media visibility of the 40 IOs and IO bodies that form the UN System broadly defined, including virtually all the major formal global IOs. I find that the IOs are systematically more visible in states where they conduct tangible development-focused operational activity. The differences are sizeable: IO media visibility in states with the lowest levels of human development is approximately 75% higher than in highest-development level states, typically Western. The empirical analysis is based on a novel dataset of more than 3.4 million news articles in 63 languages and 135 states, accounting for 96% of the world population, spanning 2018–2021. Natural language processing-based analysis is complemented with human coding of the content of a sample of articles, further highlighting the importance of the development-focused operational activity of IOs for their media visibility. The findings have important implications for our understanding of the public image of IOs in Western states and beyond.