Information flows in sub-Saharan Africa

The size of China’s State-owned media’s operations in Africa has grown significantly since the early 2000s. Previous research on the impact of increased Sino-African mediated engagements has been inconclusive. Some researchers hold that public opinion toward China in African nations has been improving because of the increased media presence. Others argue that the impact is rather limited, particularly when it comes to affecting how African media cover China-related stories. This article contributes to this debate by exploring the extent to which news media in 30 African countries relied on Chinese news sources to cover China and the COVID-19 outbreak during the first-half of 2020. By computationally analyzing a corpus of 500,000 written news stories, this paper shows that, compared to other major global players (e.g. Reuters, AFP), content distributed by Chinese media (e.g. Xinhua, China Daily) is much less likely to be used by African news organizations, both in English and French speaking countries. The analysis also reveals a gap in the prevailing themes in Chinese and African media’s coverage of the pandemic. The implications of these findings for the sub-field of Sino-African media relations, and the study of global news flows are discussed.

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China’s Media Expansion in Zambia: Influence on Government, Commercial, Community, and Religious Media

Gondwe¹

2022

Journalism and Media

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This study examines how news about China is presented, spread and impacts the diversity of opinions in state-owned, commercial, community, and religious media outlets in Zambia. Drawing from the 2012–2021 data, and guided by intermedia agenda-setting theory, we provide evidence of the counter-attitudinal influence of news content on China across the four media categories. While state-owned media emphasized issues of privatization, and government and foreign policies, community and religious media focused on issues of environmental degradation, poor labor conditions, and mining. Commercial media mirrored state-owned media, a trend also reflected in community and religious media outlets across time. These findings suggest that China shapes how the media in Zambia present content about China. As observed, over the years, China is positively presented in the Zambian media.

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Information flows in sub-Saharan Africa

Cited by 3 publications

References 18 publications

Journalism and Foreign Aid in Africa

Journalism and Foreign Aid in Africa

Who set the narrative? Assessing the influence of Chinese global media on news coverage of COVID-19 in 30 African countries

China’s Media Expansion in Zambia: Influence on Government, Commercial, Community, and Religious Media

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