Humanitarian news is the production and dissemination of factual accounts about crises and issues that affect human welfare. The field has a long tradition of raising awareness and funds for humanitarian relief, while highlighting emergency response efforts and monitoring the treatment of affected citizens. Mainstream and specialist media, as well as aid agencies and humanitarian campaigners, often produce and/or subsidize this type of journalism. Humanitarian news is also the focus of a significant research literature, though most studies to date have focused on the content of international reporting.
Today’s complex humanitarian settings pose new challenges to humanitarian work. Conflicts are more protracted and polarized, and the involvement of non-state actors has grown. Humanitarian workers also face constraints that limit their ability to respond, such as attacks on staff and restricted access to vulnerable communities. This makes it essential to understand and identify the drivers of humanitarian need, including those that are not immediately recognizable to audiences or policymakers. In this article, we review the existing literature on the drivers of humanitarian need and discuss how they might be reflected in news coverage. We then turn to the production and reception of humanitarian news, with particular attention to how this type of journalism might influence audiences’ perceptions of distant suffering and their decision-making about what to do about it. We use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data from a recent two-year collaborative project, funded by the AHRC & ISRF, that examined the content of international humanitarian journalism across major news organizations and specialist sources.