Do the Media Bow to Foreign Economic Powers? Evidence from a News Website Crackdown

Heng Chen () and Li Han ()
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Heng Chen: The Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong

No 202201, HKUST CEP Working Papers Series from HKUST Center for Economic Policy

Abstract: By exploiting a large-scale media crackdown in May 2019 in China, in which multiple influential UK- and US-based news sites were blocked, we find that media outlets, after being blocked, published more politically sensitive news on China and adopted a more negative tone in those coverages, compared to those with no access change. However, reporting on non-sensitive economic topics remained unaffected. Further evidence suggests that these findings are aligned with the interpretation that news media compromise their reporting to maintain access to China, but not with the conjecture that they retaliated against China or responded to the changed readership.

Keywords: Self-censorship; Access; Crackdown; Word Embedding; Topic Modeling; Computational Linguistics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F69 L82 L88 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna
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