Exogenous Shocks and Media Attention in the United Nations System

Over its eighty-year history, the United Nations (UN) has attracted increasing media attention, particularly amid recurring challenges to its authority, effectiveness, and legitimacy. This media coverage, however, concentrates primarily on the UN’s principal organs while largely overlooking the many specialized bodies, agencies, funds, and programs that operate in distinct policy domains. We argue that these entities within the UN system experience temporary increases in media visibility in response to exogenous shocks aligned with their organizational mandates. Such episodes of heightened visibility are accompanied by more evaluative media coverage, the direction of which depends on the nature of the shock: positive shocks generate favorable reporting, negative shocks produce critical coverage, and ambiguous shocks initially elicit neutral reporting that becomes evaluative over time, conditional on how the affected unit responds. We test this argument using a difference-in-differences design that links novel data on exogenous shocks to the mandates of UN subunits and their coverage in the German press, employing a large language model to classify the valence of reporting at scale. The findings indicate that exogenous shocks temporarily reorganize media attention within complex organizational systems, influencing how these entities are portrayed in the public sphere.