TRIADS Speaker Series with Brandon Stewart

Strengthening Propaganda and the Limits of Media Commercialization in China: Evidence from Millions of Newspaper Articles

A defining feature of the information environment in contemporary China is scripted government propaganda – the government directs newspapers to use specific language when reporting on particular events. Yet due to the mix of syndication and scripting, it is difficult to tell if any given article is explicitly government-directed news. Using a newly-collected database of six million newspaper articles from major domestic newspapers in China and linking them to leaked propaganda directives, we identify scripted propaganda coordinated by China's Central Publicity Department from 2012-2021 by examining patterns of text reuse across papers published on the same day. We demonstrate that over the past 10 years, scripting in official party newspapers shows increasing constraint and more focus on explicitly ideological content.

This event is co-sponsored with the Department of Political Science.

Bio:

Brandon Stewart is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University and is also affiliated with the Department of Politics and the Office of Population Research.  He develops new quantitative statistical methods for applications across the social sciences.  Methodologically his focus is in tools which facilitate automated text analysis and model complex heterogeneity in regression.  Many recent applications of these methods have centered on using large corpora of text to better understand propaganda in contemporary China.  His research has been published in journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis and the Proceedings of the Association of Computational Linguistics.  His work has won the Edward R Chase Dissertation Prize, the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology, and the Political Analysis Editor’s Choice Award.

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