Humanitarian news is news coverage with an incisive humanitarian angle on current global crises. The research focuses on the most prominent crisis situations and seeks to understand how news media coverage shapes public perception, policy response, and implicitly funding allocation in times of international emergency.
The study uses a unique combination of quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. Articles were retrieved from the world’s most extensive internet index via the Google News API and enriched with structured humanitarian information sourced from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The resulting dataset included 78,667 articles spanning 10 major humanitarian crises. To normalize coverage and ensure a direct comparison between the number of articles per crisis and the actual impact of each situation on people in need, we added three attributes to each article record: crisis start date, number of people affected, and required humanitarian funding (in scale of billions).
To identify the presence of a humanitarian framing in each article, a rule-based pass was implemented that matched search keywords with article titles and snippets. This filtering process was designed to be sensitive early on and isolate clear-cut cases, allowing for a rapid screening of high-quality content without consuming large amounts of computational resources.
The results of the analysis show a clear prevalence of the humanitarian frame, beating out both military and geopolitical frames in articles on the two most prominently covered crises: Gaza and Ukraine. This suggests a journalistic inclination to highlight the suffering of the victims and refocus the international community’s moral obligations in the face of urgent crisis. However, the findings also indicate that news coverage fails to provide contextualized information about the causes of these disasters and operates to erase local response teams and their agency.