May We Have Your Attention Please? Human-Rights NGOs and the Problem of Global Communication

Abstract

Historically, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have relied on mainstream news media to expose human-rights violations and encourage governments to pressure the perpetrators. Thanks to the Internet, NGOs are crafting new strategies for conducting information politics. Despite the obvious democratization of access to the means of communication, however, the new media may in fact represent a more challenging environment in which to be heard for some groups seeking global attention. We draw on agenda-setting research to develop a theory of global attention bottlenecks and use it to explain the success of 257 transnational human-rights groups at generating attention in both international mainstream news media and social media outlets. We conclude that most NGOs lack the organizational resources to compete effectively for either traditional news coverage or for public attention and that the Internet is unlikely to resolve the problem of global communication.