Seeing the State: Media Manipulation (In)visibility in Chinese News

• In Event: Authoritarian Politics

Abstract

Under what circumstances can individuals living in countries with strong government media control identify media objects manipulated by the state? Authoritarian regimes today use more subtle forms of media control than the dictatorships of the 20th century. In the case of China, media commercialization has created a mixed environment where content placed by the state propaganda apparatus is distributed alongside commercially-driven content. Individuals' capacity to discern state manipulated content has implications for propaganda effects: demobilization effects, for example, require recognition of media control. Despite this theoretical importance, discernment has not been subject to empirical test in the case of state propaganda. This paper employs three pre-registered online survey experiments to investigate under what circumstances Chinese respondents can distinguish between newspaper articles placed by the state and those written by newspapers themselves. We focus on a particular type of state propaganda: scripting directives, internal instructions from Chinese state authorities to Chinese media organizations to reprint a proscribed script when reporting on a topic or event. In the first experiment we show respondents scripted and non-scripted newspaper articles on the same news event. We demonstrate that Chinese respondents can distinguish between scripted and non-scripted articles. In a second experiment we use the same design, but test respondents' interest in scripted and non-scripted coverage. We find no difference in interest, providing further evidence our experiment one results capture discernment of state intervention rather than evaluations of article quality. In the third experiment we use a more representative set of scripted and non-scripted articles on similar topics rather than the same event. We replicate our first experiment and furthermore measure the content signals respondents use to discern scripted propaganda. Our paper brings the question of discernment and perception to the empirical study of authoritarian propaganda.

Author

• Hannah Waight, University of Oregon