Hard news, soft news, and tough issues: The symbiotic relationships between NGOs, news agencies, and international development

This study illustrates how news agencies, as custodians of facts and as trusted global storytellers, present international development issues, specifically those involving development-oriented NGOs. I find that most media routinely overlook such issues as poverty, health, and education, which are all at the core of development initiatives. The broad question asked in this study is how NGOs interact with media in the context of the Millennium Development Goals, a global agreement to halve poverty by 2015. By exploring the symbiotic relationship between development-oriented NGOs and mass media, I investigate their roles and examine how they affect global discourse for social change, including how stereotypes are carried forward in mass media. I argue that many NGO campaigns have shifted to include participatory elements, unlike previous models of top-down communication; however, most news agencies continue practices of privileging Northern perspectives and covering events rather than issues. Simply, I look at the "hard news" reported by news agencies, the "soft news" of NGO public relations campaigns for media coverage, and the "tough issues" of international development.