Lei Guo wins 2018 ICA’s Top Faculty Paper Award for her work on intermedia agenda-setting in Chinese online news.
Intermedia agenda-setting theory has been widely used to explain news dynamics in western democracies. The extent to which the effect takes place in authoritarian regimes remains a question. This study focuses on the online media ecology in contemporary China, a media environment that mixes the forces of government surveillance, market competition, and the push for independent news reporting. Specifically, the study examined how different types of online news influenced each other in covering the Two Sessions, China’s biggest annual political event. In order to obtain a holistic view of Chinese online news, computational methods such as unsupervised and supervised machine learning were employed to analyze 33,875 articles from 291 online news sources in March 2017. Results showed that privately-owned, commercial news sites emerged as the agenda setter in China’s online media landscape, indicating that non-official discourse may find its way to expand in the country’s online public sphere.
Guo, L. (2018, May). The rise of non-official voices in China: Inter-media agenda setting in a controlled media environment. Paper presented at the 68th annual conference of the International Communication Association, Prague, Czech Republic.