Waight Hannah, Yuan Yin, Roberts Margaret E, Stewart Brandon M
Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403.
Department of Political Science, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Mar 18;122(11):e2408260122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2408260122. Epub 2025 Mar 11.
Autocratic governments around the world use clandestine propaganda campaigns to influence the media. We document a decade-long trend in China toward the planting of government-authored articles in party and commercial newspapers. To examine this phenomenon, we develop an approach to identifying scripted propaganda-the coerced reprinting of lightly adapted government-authored articles in newspapers-that leverages the footprints left by the government when making media interventions. We show that in China, scripted propaganda is a daily phenomenon-on 90% of days from 2012 to 2022, the vast majority of party newspapers include at least some scripted propaganda at the direction of a central directive. On particular sensitive days, the amount of scripted propaganda can spike to 30% of the articles appearing in major newspapers. We show that scripted propaganda has strengthened under President Xi Jinping. In the last decade, the front page of party newspapers has evolved from 5% scripted articles to approximately 20% scripted. This government-authored content throughout the paper is increasingly homogeneous-fewer and fewer adaptations are done by individual newspapers. In contrast to popular speculation, we show that scripted content is not only on ideological topics (although it is increasingly ideological) and is also very prevalent in commercial papers. Using a case study of domestic coverage of COVID-19, we demonstrate how the regime uses scripting to shape, constrain, and delay information during crises. Our findings reveal the wide-ranging influence of government-authored propaganda in China's media ecosystem.
世界上的独裁政府利用秘密宣传活动来影响媒体。我们记录了中国在党报和商业报纸上刊登政府撰写文章长达十年的趋势。为了研究这一现象，我们开发了一种识别脚本式宣传的方法——在报纸上强制转载经过轻微改编的政府撰写文章——该方法利用了政府在进行媒体干预时留下的痕迹。我们发现，在中国，脚本式宣传是一种日常现象——在2012年至2022年的90%的日子里，绝大多数党报至少包含一些按照中央指示的脚本式宣传。在特别敏感的日子里，脚本式宣传的数量可能会飙升至主要报纸上出现文章的30%。我们发现，在习近平主席领导下，脚本式宣传有所加强。在过去十年中，党报的头版从5%的脚本式文章演变为约20%的脚本式文章。整篇报纸中这种政府撰写的内容越来越同质化——个别报纸进行的改编越来越少。与普遍猜测相反，我们发现脚本式内容不仅涉及意识形态话题（尽管它越来越具有意识形态性），而且在商业报纸中也非常普遍。通过对国内新冠疫情报道的案例研究，我们展示了该政权在危机期间如何利用脚本来塑造、限制和延迟信息。我们的研究结果揭示了政府撰写的宣传在中国媒体生态系统中的广泛影响。
