Media Bias in China

By Bei Qin, David Strömberg, Yanhui Wu. The American Economic Review, 2018

179 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines whether and how market competition affected the political bias of government-owned newspapers in China from 1981 to 2011. We measure media bias based on coverage of government mouthpiece content ( propaganda) relative to commercial content. We first find that a reform that forced newspaper exits (reduced competition) affected media bias by increasing product specialization, with some papers focusing on propaganda and others on commercial content. Second, lower-level governments produce less-biased content and launch commercial newspapers earlier, eroding higher-level governments’ political goals. Third, bottom-up competition intensifies the politico-economic trade-off, leading to product proliferation and less audience exposure to propaganda. (JEL D72, L31, L82, O14, O17, P26, P31)

Subfields: Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43e8a83caeda75547cfa182e28d31229c596745c

Citations in the corpus

• Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda (2017, unknown): “[28] Qin, Bei, David Stromberg, and Yanhui Wu.”
• Willingness to Pay for Clean Air: Evidence from Air Purifier Markets in China (2020, unknown): “This sudden change in media coverage provides a useful research environment to examine the relationship between information and MWTP 19 AllChinese newspapers are completely or primarilyownedby thestate (Qin,Str ö mberg, and Wu 2018).”