ABSTRACT
A recent report from UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) suggests that Western media images, including NGO marketing campaigns, may be seriously hampering efforts to persuade people to donate toward aid projects (Godwin, 1994). By accentuating the negative, as well as over-personalizing and under-emphasizing the socio-political causes of poverty (for example, debt repayments, famine), NGO fund-raising projects, like TV reports, might be helping to create a widespread and erroneous impression that the ‘Third World’ poor are a hapless, hopeless, and even blameworthy case. A similar warning has also been sounded within the West, regarding images of aid recipients in Ireland (Eayrs and Ellis, 1990). Such warnings potentially extend beyond the immediate, toward a more longer-term and perhaps universal erosion of social capital.
