information:extraction, structural:expansion
Media and public opinion

Media and public relations played a central role in the war, due to their influence on morale at home and the dynamics of international involvement. Both sides relied heavily on external support. Biafra hired the New York public relations firm of Ruder and Finn to lobby American public opinion. However, it was not until Biafra hired the Geneva public relations Markpress in January 1968 that significant international sympathy was won. Markpress was headed by an American public relations executive, William Bernhardt, who was paid 12,000 Swiss francs per month for his services, and who expected a share of Biafra's oil revenues after the war. Markpress's portrayal of the war as a struggle for freedom by the Catholic Igbos against the Muslim-dominated north won the support of Catholic opinion all over the world, especially in the United States. Besides portraying the war as a Christian-Muslim conflict, Markpress accused the Federal government of waging genocide against the Igbos, a campaign that was extremely effective as pictures of starving Igbos won the sympathy of the world.

Media campaigns focused on the plight of the Biafrans intensified internationally in the summer of 1968. By the Biafran leadership and then around the world, the pogroms and famine were classified as genocide and compared to The Holocaust; hypothetical Judaic origins of the Igbos were used to bolster comparisons with Jews in Germany. In the international press, Igbo refugee camps were compared to Nazi extermination camps.

Humanitarian appeals differed somewhat from place to place. In the United Kingdom, humanitarian aid used familiar discourses of imperial responsibility; in Ireland, advertisements appealed to shared Catholicism and experiences of civil war. Both of these appeals channelled older cultural values into support for the new model of international NGOs. In Ireland, public opinion identified intensely with Biafra as most of the Catholic priests working in Biafra were Irish who naturally sympathised with the Biafrans, who they saw as fellow Catholics struggling for independence. The Irish journalist John Hogan who covered the war noted: "The threat of famine, combined with an independence struggle, had an almost irresistible political and emotional impact on Irish public opinion, which became hugely supportive of the regular airlifts, via the off-shore Portuguese island of São Tomé, of food and medical supplies to the beleaguered infant republic". The use of famine as a conscious tactic by the Federal government who wanted to starve Biafra into submission provoked parallels with the Great Famine of Ireland of the 1840s while many Irish people saw a parallel with Igbo struggle for independence with their own independence struggle. The pro-Biafra British journalist Frederick Forsyth started covering the war in the summer of 1967 for the BBC, became angry at the pro-Nigeria stance of the British government and resigned in protest in September 1967. Returning as a freelance journalist in 1968, Forysth worked closely with the Irish Holy Ghost Fathers to collect information about the famine, and whose dispatches from Biafra had an immense impact on British public opinion.

In Israel, the Holocaust comparison was promoted, as was the theme of threat from hostile Muslim neighbours.

The Biafran war presented Westerners with the notion of starving African children. The Biafran famine was one of the first African disasters to receive widespread media coverage, enabled by the proliferation of television sets. The televised disaster and the rising NGOs mutually enhanced each other; NGOs maintained their own communications networks and played a significant role in shaping news coverage.

Biafran elites studied Western propaganda techniques and released carefully constructed public communications in an intentional fashion. Biafran propagandists had the dual task of appealing to international public opinion, and maintaining morale and nationalist spirit domestically. Political cartoons were a preferred medium for publicising simple interpretations of the war. Biafra also used push polling to insinuate messages about Nigeria's inherent bloodthirstiness. Novelist Chinua Achebe became a committed propagandist for Biafra, and one of its leading international advocates.

On 29 May 1969, Bruce Mayrock, a student at Columbia University, set himself ablaze at the premises of the United Nations Headquarters in New York, to protest what he viewed as a genocide against the people of Biafra. He died of his injuries the following day. On 25 November 1969, musician John Lennon returned the MBE he had awarded by Queen Elizabeth II in 1964 in protest against British support for Nigeria. In his letter to the Queen returning the MBE, Lennon wrote: "Your Majesty, I am returning this in protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts. With love. John Lennon.".