Measuring Mass Media’s Political Alignment in Single-Party Regimes

• In Event: Unpacking Propaganda and Disinformation in Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

In this paper, I describe a novel measure based on the structural topic model to describe heterogeneity in news content of different media outlets in authoritarian regimes, and apply it on a sample of more than 48,000 articles from 76 Vietnamese online newspapers. Overall, the measure has high level of construct validity, while also being robust to specific choice of distance metrics, topic model configurations, and data sample. Using the measure, I demonstrate that newspapers in Vietnam exhibit considerable systematic variations, with those sponsored by military and provincial Party committees exhibiting closer alignment to the Vietnamese Communist Party’s official newspapers than those sponsored by business and professional associations. In a separate analysis, I show that negative budgetary shocks to provincial governments lead the province’s newspapers to become more closely aligned with the newspapers
connected to the central Party.

Author

• Duy Trinh, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology