How Russia Sets Its News Agenda at Home
P2-2
Presented by: Lanabi la Lova
How do news manipulations in an autocracy vary across different types of mass media outlets? I conjecture that in Russia, state-controlled news published online, for consumption by a digitally literate audience, exhibits less pro-regime bias than programming created for those who rely on national television to learn about daily affairs. I test the conjecture using three data sets: headlines displayed on the Yandex News Aggregator, transcripts of evening news on Channel 1, and reports from a private news agency, Interfax, examining how daily reporting varied in topics across the media outlets. Using crowdsourcing, supervised machine learning, and dictionary techniques, I analyse 70,000 news reports from August 2018 - March 2020. Results indicate that the state-controlled online platform, in contrast to national television channels, demonstrates less tendency to censor stories about political opposition and bad economic news, but promotes stronger measurable bias in the coverage of foreign affairs, specifically news that involves Ukraine and the US.