Chapter 6 Flashcards
What is one key consequences of globalization?
The activities of organizations in one part of the world are increasingly bound up with people’s lives in other, distant, parts of the world.
Why the difficulty in identifying a clear causal connection between media content and its effect is important?
Because it shapes donors’ willingness to support media coverage of development and the global South. As long as donors require there to be clear lines of causality between the work that they fund and the outcomes achieved, support for media representations of development will likely not be a priority.
What is the significance of statistics on global poverty?
It derives from the assumption that how the public in donor countries thinks and feels about aid and development influences public policy about it.
What is the argument of the World Bank regarding this issue?
In recent years, donor countries have committed to dramatic increases in the supply of foreign aid to developing countries. Meeting and sustaining such commitments will require sufficient support among donor country voter and taxpayers.
Why the media play a key role in determining the nature of public support for official development assistance (ODA)?
Since few members of the public have personal experience of international development efforts or travail to aid recipient countries.
What is the media impact on government aid?
The media have a significant impact on government aid budgets, however the connection between media representations and development policy is highy problematic.
What is the first key assumption in the argument of the media’s influence on public support for ODA?
Media content has a direct influence on public opinion. Such an assumption is evident in two kinds of claim.
What is the first claim of this assumption?
There are optimistic accounts which argue (or assume) that media content has a strong, positive influence on public disproportions towards the global South.
How these accounts usually understand the role of the media?
In political and civic terms – as a source of information. Media coverage of the global South creates a more informed public who will be more inclined to support higher levels of government spending on aid.
What is the second claim of this assumption?
A pessimistic counterview argues that the media promote cynical and stereotypical ways of understanding the world rather than acting as a source of information.
How the media exposure influence public?
Media exposure has the opposite influence on public dispositions towards the global South and on corresponding levels of support for overseas aid.
What did Jennifer van Heerde-Hudson and David Hudson found?
On average, awareness of events in developing countries from TV news or newspaper readership is negatively related to concern or support. The largely negative sensationalistic and truncated nature of media coverage of global poverty works to reduce individuals’ feelings of efficacy in solving the issue.
On what point the pessimistic and optimistic accounts agree?
Albeit from different standpoints, that the media have a direct influence on public support for overseas aid. However, both accounts also suffer from a number of key weaknesses which disrupt their rather simplistic claims of media effects (in addition to offering contradictory claims).
What both accounts fail to do primarily?
To pays sufficient attention to the ability of the audience to contest, negotiate and reject media content, assuming instead that audiences all respond to media content in the same, predictable, way.
On what factors our feelings about levels of overseas aid depends on?
Perceptions of aid effectiveness and levels of poverty in other countries, for instance. Some of these perceptions may well have been informed by the media, but they will also have been simultaneously negotiated through audiences’ existing knowledge and attitudes through the context of consumption.
Through what are attitudes towards foreign aid are refined?
Individual personalities, values, beliefs and interests, resulting in complex, contingent, contested and highly personalized standpoints.
Why the individual media use is also a deciding factor?
Since the content of different texts is likely to offer very different influences. Thus, while the media may well have a role to play in informing public attitudes towards overseas aid, the nature of this influence will differ greatly between individuals and between different media. Media effects are certainly not direct, universal or predictable.
What is a more fruitful way of conceptualizing the role of the media?
To examine their influence on how issues are framed.
What is the study of the influence of the framing of poverty of Shanto Iyengar?
The media do not have a direct influence on particular elements of public disposition, but they can shape the way in which public dispositions are structured.
How the way people think about poverty is dependent on how the issue is framed?
When news media presentations frame poverty as a general outcome, responsibility for poverty is assigned to society-at-large; when news presentations frame poverty as a particular instance of a poor person, responsibility is assigned to the individual.
What are the effects of the frames engendered by the media?
The media have powerful effects on judgement and choice. The understanding of causal responsibility engendered by a particular news frames influences the degree to which people hold government responsible for assisting the poor and the amount of governmental assistance respondents are willing to award to poor people.
What Iyengar shows about how the media can structure public dispositions?
By making particular ways of understanding the world available and others less so. While media may not have a direct and predictable effect on public support for ODA, there are more measured ways of thinking about the complex and subtle influences that the media do have.
What is the second major assumption?
Public opinion influences government policy in this area. In the context of current international commitments to increase aid, levels of public support for ODA have indeed taken on greater salience. A commitment to ODA can be maintained only with support from the public.
Where can be found some evidence of positive relationship between public support and government expenditure on aid?
By comparing donor countries. Nordic countries, which have particularly high levels of support for aid, also have high levels of ODA as percentage of GNP while the opposite is true for countries with low levels of public support, such as Germany.
Why such correlations exist according to Marc Stern?
Because where public support is well articulated and well informed, it can make the political price sufficiently high to both protect and increase aid.
Why is the causal chain that connects public attitudes and public policy unclear?
Identifying what the public’s attitude towards ODA actually is is extremely difficult. Various unreliable measures of public attitudes towards the global South are used as indicators in public opinion surveys. Expressions of concern for poverty in developing countries are for example, often taken to be equivalent to public support for ODA, when they are two different issues.
What is the social desirability response bias?
Measures of support for current or increased levels of development assistance are heavily influenced by it. Also described as the thought who is going to say no to this.
What is the result of the social desirability response bias?
It would be unwise to simplistically assume that there exists any single or stable public opinion on such complex matters. Support for ODA is generally regarded as remarkably weak. Political parties’ policies on international development are not key election issue.
If public opinion is so shallow, shifting and difficult to capture, how can it possibly influence policy?
There is no single public opinion, so how does one respond to a huge community, a public community of stakeholders. The only time that public opinion is likely to have some influence is with respect to levels of short-term, humanitarian, aid, when it is often as its clearest and strongest.
What leaves decision-making on ODA as elite-centred and top-down?
The strong public support for helping the poor has an outlet in the form of emergency assistance and support for NGOs. Governments therefore have a relative freedom in this policy area to pursue their sense of moral obligation to do the right thing, even if this goes against public opinion.
Why is it important to make a distinction between mass public opinion and elite opinion?
Mass public opinion may influence ODA only in certain contexts while elite opinion may be far more important in influencing decision-making.
What determined the public support for ODA?
Public support for ODA is itself a composite determined by a range of public attitudes towards the global South, whose causal relationship with media is, at best, difficult to determine. We can conclude that while there me be some link between the media levels of ODA, the nature of this link is varied, contingent, indirect and extremely difficult to isolate. Media representations may matter for development, but influencing support for ODA and levels of government aid is not the most compelling example of their significance.
What are some of the potential consequences that media-informed public attitudes can have for development?
The possible impact of the media on government aid budgets, decision to give money to overseas charities, join protests, sign petitions, buy fair-trade goods and travel to other countries are all, to a greater or lesser extent, informed in some way by media representations.
What this more diffuse role of the media in public’s engagement with development issues have lack of?
A coherent framework, or even an informed vocabulary.
How are defined the ways in which the public are disposed towards the global South?
Engagement interest, understanding, perceptions, appetite and being informed.
How is described the media coverage of the global South?
Negative and should be more positive. Western publics are seen to have negative perceptions and ways need to be found of using the media to encourage them to be more positive.
Why is this positive/negative dichotomy highly problematic?
Because it grossly oversimplifies the complex and nuanced ways in which the global South is represented and how these representations influence public attitudes and behaviours. Defining stories as positive or negative is reductive and even childish. Stories are interesting or dull, surprising or obvious, not positive or negative. Stories can be seen as positive by some and negative by others.
What is the concept of cosmopolitanism?
A means of referring to (mediated) public sentiment vis-à-vis faraway strangers. The term has traditionally been associated with a particular understanding of political governance which entails a more inclusive relationship between nations and individuals within nations (perhaps even aimed at a world government).
More recently, how the term cosmopolitanism has been described?
A revolution in the social sciences. One way in which the term has been reactivated has been in references to a particular disposition associated with a conscious openness to cultural differences, which entails, first of all, a willingness to engage with the other.
What does being cosmopolitan or citizen of the world mean?
Having a disposition which is not limited to the concerns of the immediate locality, but which recognises global belonging, involvement and responsibility. It is the sense of openness to the world which better captures what is about public attitudes that influences our willingness to engage in development-related activities, such as eco-tourism, ethical consumerism or supporting NGOs.
