cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32261670

If someone picks up a newspaper in China, there’s a good chance it contains some government propaganda masquerading as news, according to a new study co-led by a University of Oregon expert.

Hannah Waight, an assistant professor of sociology at the UO, and her collaborators found that the use of state-planted propaganda is on the rise in China. And it’s not just a tool for spreading ideological content. It’s also used to control and constrain other kinds of information beyond political ideals, including natural disaster and public health reporting in China, according to the researchers’ findings.

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The researchers developed an approach that could identify instances where newspapers followed propaganda “scripts” from the government or were coerced into covering something in a specific way. The research team applied this formula to millions of newspaper articles over the course of the decade from 2012–22, which is aligned with President Xi Jinping’s authoritarian consolidation of power.

They validated their method by comparing their findings to leaked documents, which they obtained from China Digital Times, a U.S.-based nonprofit media organization. The leaked documents contained directives from the government about what newspapers should print. Their side-by-side analysis confirmed that their approach was accurately identifying propaganda.

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Here is the study The decade-long growth of government-authored news media in China under Xi Jinping

TLDR:

• Scripted propaganda -the coerced reprinting of lightly adapted government-authored articles in newspapers- is a daily phenomenon: on 90% of days from 2012 to 2022, the vast majority of Chinese Communist Party newspapers include at least some scripted propaganda at the direction of a central directive.

• On particular sensitive days, the amount of scripted propaganda can spike to 30% of the articles appearing in major newspapers.

• Scripted propaganda has strengthened under President Xi Jinping. In the last decade, the front page of party newspapers has evolved from 5% scripted articles to approximately 20% scripted.

• The government-authored content throughout the paper is increasingly homogeneous—fewer and fewer adaptations are done by individual newspapers.

• In contrast to popular speculation, we show that scripted content is not only on ideological topics (although it is increasingly ideological) and is also very prevalent in commercial papers. Using a case study of domestic coverage of COVID-19, we demonstrate how the regime uses scripting to shape, constrain, and delay information during crises.

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