Authoritarian Media, Propaganda, and Crisis

• In Event: Domestic Sources of China’s Overseas Policies

Abstract

In times of crisis, how do media outlets strategize their coverage under market-based and authoritarian political constraints, and how does this coverage vary as the authoritarian state’s own handling of the crisis varies in efficacy? Utilizing a dataset of newspaper articles at the beginning and end of COVID-related controls in the PRC, this paper analyzes how media outlets strategically adapted their coverage as a function of their efficacy in handling disasters. Based on a typology that sorts authoritarian media responses to crisis as positive legitimation, negative legitimation, mobilization, and distraction, we examine how media coverage changed based on early-pandemic effective crisis response to late-pandemic ineffective crisis response in China. Our theory holds that, as the efficacy of crisis handling decreases, authoritarian media outlets will rely more on distraction, publishing more articles irrelevant to the crisis. Conversely, when crisis handling is more efficacious, propaganda will rely more on positive legitimation and mobilization, calling attention to their efficacious crisis handling and other nations’ failures to opportunistically legitimate the regime while exhorting citizens to take part in crisis mitigation efforts. We test this theory using a combination of structural topic models and word embeddings to measure topical shifts and propaganda strategies, respectively.

Authors

• Patrick Chester, University of California, San Diego

• Yan Liu, University of California, San Diego

• Harris Doshay, Princeton University