Humanity's publics: NGOs, journalism, and the international public sphere.

摘要

As legacy news outlets slash foreign news budgets, international NGOs have been discussed as sources of both promise and caution with respect to the future of foreign news -- for journalists, for advocates and for citizens. To optimists, NGOs provide original, insightful reporting from neglected areas of the world. To skeptics, the influence of such groups augurs a worrisome conflation of the lines between advocacy and journalism, with deleterious consequences befalling both parties. This dissertation tests these competing claims by asking what the information work of NGOs is, what types of news coverage they support and whether NGOs expand or reinforce established patterns of international news attention.;The dissertation puts forward three primary findings. First, NGO information work is neither singular nor shaped entirely by the preferences of the news media. Instead, both NGOs and news media are internally differentiated between elite and general public sectors and the international differentiations correspond to different relations across sectors -- making interactions between elite-oriented NGOs and the prestige press much more likely than interactions, and vice versa. Second, different relationships between NGOs and news outlets shape different types of news coverage, including a policy/elite set of discussions conducted in the prestige press and oriented towards high-level decision-making; and also a discourse of donation and charity in search of potential donors. Third, the capacity of NGOs to live up to their stated missions of raising awareness of neglected parts of the world depends on where they seek publicity. A group's capacity to bring countries from outside the media spotlight into it is most likely to occur in the prestige press, not the broadcast media.;The dissertation concludes by evaluating the normative implications of the research findings. If one sees the role of public communication as mediating between experts, the data provide room of cautious optimism. NGOs that align with the prestige press constitute a modest expansion of elites and allow for civil society perspectives to be articulated in elite discussions. If, however, one sees the role of NGOs as raising general public awareness of issues outside the media spotlight, the space for optimism diminishes greatly.