Last year, OECD countries collectively allocated more than $220 billion (7.8 trillion baht) in official development assistance (ODA). But a rising tide of disinformation is undermining the effectiveness of these investments.
For example, 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 doesn't exist or is not worth addressing. As Covid-19 showed, pandemic responses can be undermined if people fall victim to misleading health advice. And 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 may be poorly managed in the absence of transparent and equitable governance.
More worryingly, disinformation threatens not only development but also democracy itself. As news organisations struggle to survive a 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. And yet, while autocratic regimes invest billions in disinformation, Western countries are doing little to address the problem.
The OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) recently published a landmark report underscoring 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. 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, as Freedom House's report on China's global media influence shows.
Over the last decade, the percentage of the global population living under autocratic rule has risen from 49% to 70%, disinformation has surged in every country, and the financial threats confronting independent media have become existential. But support for media has remained stagnant, with 38 OECD countries spending a total of around US$500 million per year (18 billion baht) -- or about a third of Russia's estimated propaganda budget. This represents less than 0.2% of total ODA in 2022 (the most recent year for which statistics are available).
Worse, only a small fraction of this support is directly channelled to independent media organisations in recipient countries. The report finds that less than 10% of ODA for media and the information environment is delivered to journalists, media outlets, and civil society organisations focused on journalism. This represents a mere 0.05% of total ODA between 2016 and 2022.
Fortunately, some donor countries have finally begun to recognise this need. In March, the OECD DAC 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 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.
In addition, preserving the editorial independence of media outlets remains essential. While the amount of ODA going directly to media organisations 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.
Our organisation, the International Fund for Public Interest Media (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 editorial independence.
Equally important are the other global, regional, and local organisations that help strengthen the capacity of independent media, advocate for press freedom, and push for regulatory reform. The International Fund was set up to work in synergy with these entities.
All of these initiatives are ready to scale up their support. But 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. This can 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 will fundamentally alter the information ecosystem, making investment in journalism even more critical. With enough funding, independent news outlets will 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% to 1% of total ODA -- a relatively small increase, given the scale of the challenge -- more than $2 billion would be available for the sector globally.
Western countries have been lamenting the crisis in independent media for over a decade now. But foreign-aid spending on journalism has remained flat over that period. The world has changed drastically in the last 10 years, and a shift in donor strategy is long overdue. ©2024 Project Syndicate
Nishant Lalwani is Co-Founder and CEO of the International Fund for Public Interest Media. James Deane is also a Co-Founder. Maha Taki is Director of the What Works Unit.
