Close to Beijing: Geographic Biases in People’s Daily

Morley J. Weston and Adrian Rauchfleisch
Additional contact information
Morley J. Weston: Graduate Institute of Geography, National Taiwan University, Taiwan (R.O.C)
Adrian Rauchfleisch: Graduate Institute of Journalism, National Taiwan University, Taiwan (R.O.C)

Media and Communication, 2021, vol. 9, issue 3, 59-73

Abstract: Inequities in China are reflected within state-run media coverage due to its specific role “guiding public opinion,” and with our study we contribute to the geographic turn in the Chinese context with regard to media and journalism. As a subject of a spatial study, China is unique due to several factors: geographic diversity, authoritarian control, and centralized media. By analyzing text from 53,000 articles published in People’s Daily (rénmín rìbào, 人民日報) from January 2016 to August 2020, we examine how the amount of news coverage varies by region within China, how topics and sentiments manifest in different places, and how coverage varies with regard to foreign countries. Automated methods were used to detect place names from the articles and geoparse them to specific locations, combining spatial analysis, topic modeling and sentiment analysis to identify geographic biases in news coverage in an authoritarian context. We found remarkably uniform and positive coverage domestically, but substantial differences towards coverage of different foreign countries.

Keywords: authoritarian public; China; Chinese media system; People’s Daily; propaganda; spatial analysis; news values (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/3966 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:meanco:v9:y:2021:i:3:p:59-73

DOI: 10.17645/mac.v9i3.3966

Access Statistics for this article

Media and Communication is currently edited by Raquel Silva

More articles in Media and Communication from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().