Last year, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries collectively allocated more than US$220 billion in official development assistance (ODA). However, a rising tide of disinformation is undermining the effectiveness of these investments.
A massive increase in financing for climate adaptation is urgently needed, but the impact of calls for increased investment would likely be limited if disinformation campaigns persuade people that global warming does not exist or is not worth addressing. As COVID-19 showed, pandemic responses can be undermined if people fall victim to misleading health advice. Without a free and independent press to hold politicians and policymakers to account, famines become more likely, because increasingly scarce resources such as water and arable land might be poorly managed in the absence of transparent and equitable governance.
More worryingly, disinformation threatens not only development, but also democracy itself. As news organizations struggle to survive in a complex and fast-changing media landscape, abuses of political and corporate power go unchecked. Independent journalism is one of the cheapest and most efficacious bulwarks against authoritarianism. In fact, it is so effective that autocrats are spending billions of dollars each year to undermine it by influencing domestic and foreign media narratives, a Freedom House report on China’s global media influence showed.
Illustration: Yusha
Yet while autocratic regimes invest billions in disinformation, Western countries are doing little to address the problem. To be sure, policymakers and politicians emphasize the vital role of press freedom in speeches, disinformation reports and democracy conferences. However, global government investment in public-interest journalism remains shockingly low.
The OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) published a landmark report that underscores this “mismatch between rhetoric and resource allocation.” A detailed mapping study of ODA for media found that donor countries have not allocated enough resources to respond adequately to the dramatic erosion of information integrity worldwide.
Over the past decade, the percentage of the global population living under autocratic rule has risen, from 49 percent to 70 percent, disinformation has surged in every country and the financial threats confronting independent media have become existential. However, support for media has remained stagnant, with 38 OECD countries spending a total of about US$500 million per year — or about one third of Russia’s estimated propaganda budget. This represents less than 0.2 percent of total ODA in 2022 (the most recent year for which statistics are available).
Worse, only a small fraction of this support is directly channeled to independent media organizations in recipient countries.
Less than 10 percent of ODA for media and the information environment is delivered to journalists, media outlets and civil society organizations focused on journalism, the report found. This represents a mere 0.05 percent of total ODA between 2016 and 2022. Unless ODA for journalism is significantly increased, public-interest media in many countries would die out, with dire consequences for the societies served by these outlets. Democratic processes would be destabilized and progress on development would be stunted — perhaps irrevocably so.
Fortunately, some donor countries have finally begun to recognize this need. The OECD DAC in March published a new set of principles for providing relevant and effective support to media and the information environment, which call for increasing financial and other forms of support, and strengthening local leadership and ownership. This means “ensuring a more significant share of ODA for media development reaches local and regional actors directly” and “increasing the availability and accessibility of direct, flexible and reliable support, including core funding and longer-term, multi-year funding.”
That suggests that the low levels of spending on independent journalism do not reflect a lack of knowledge or evidence. Rather, donor countries consider this type of support to be politically challenging and difficult to execute — and rightly so. Investment in independent media can complicate government-to-government relationships. Moreover, even large donor countries are unable to invest in the staff required to support media organizations effectively as part of their bilateral ODA support to countries.
In addition, preserving the editorial independence of media outlets remains essential. While the amount of ODA going directly to media organizations is unacceptably low, it would also be inappropriate for donor countries to increase direct support themselves — no government should be picking and choosing which news outlets are worthy of support.
The International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM) — which financially supported the OECD DAC study, but played no role in data collection or analysis — was created to address these challenges. As a multilateral fund that pools contributions from a large and diverse group of donors, it is designed to channel funding to media outlets quickly and at scale, without compromising the editorial independence of the newsrooms it supports.
Equally important are the other global, regional and local organizations that help strengthen the capacity of independent media, advocate for press freedom and push for regulatory reform. The IFPIM was set up to work in synergy with these entities.
All of these initiatives are ready to scale up their support. However, they need more resources. They must also work together to make media support a more central part of political discussions related to foreign policy and international development. By working together, we can urge government decisionmakers who have leverage over ODA spending to increase support for this critically important area. That could be achieved by amplifying constructive voices and broadening the coalition of actors supporting independent media, particularly by connecting journalism’s plight to other high-profile problems such as disinformation and corruption.
Looking ahead, artificial intelligence would fundamentally alter the information ecosystem, making investment in journalism even more critical. With enough funding, independent news outlets would be able to develop the tools and the capacity to deploy new technologies in the service of the public interest, rather than being left behind — as they were after the rise of social media. If OECD donor countries increased their support for media from 0.2 percent to 1 percent of total ODA — a relatively small increase, given the scale of the challenge — more than US$2 billion would be available for the sector globally.
Western countries have been lamenting the crisis in independent media for more than a decade now. However, foreign-aid spending on journalism has remained flat over that period. The world has changed drastically in the past 10 years and a shift in donor strategy is long overdue. Now is the time to save independent journalism. The longer we let disinformation thrive, the less likely it would be that democracy survives.
Nishant Lalwani is cofounder and CEO of the International Fund for Public Interest Media. Maha Taki is director of the What Works Unit at the International Fund for Public Interest Media. James Deane is co-founder of the International Fund for Public Interest Media.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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