The decade-long growth of government-authored news media in China under Xi Jinping.

ABSTRACT: Autocratic governments around the world use clandestine propaganda campaigns to influence the media. We document a decade-long trend in China toward the planting of government-authored articles in party and commercial newspapers. To examine this phenomenon, we develop an approach to identifying scripted propaganda-the coerced reprinting of lightly adapted government-authored articles in newspapers-that leverages the footprints left by the government when making media interventions. We show that in China, scripted propaganda is a daily phenomenon-on 90% of days from 2012 to 2022, the vast majority of 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 artic

SUBMITTER: Waight H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11929391 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature