Differentiation between newspapers in the PRC: a comparative content analysis of People’s Daily and Southern Metropolitan Daily

There is general agreement that the Chinese press is controlled by the Communist Party and that its primary function is the dissemination of propaganda. It is therefore often assumed that journalism in the PRC is completely uniform, consisting of different outlets retailing the same message. Against this, some authors have suggested that certain papers, for example the official party press, occupy a more 'conservative' position and other, more commercially-driven, titles occupy a more 'liberal' position. While the latter position has long been supported by anecdotal evidence, there has so far been no systematic comparison of the contents of different Chinese newspapers in order to provide firm evidence of the extent of differentiation. This paper provides the first empirical evidence support the latter view. It reports the results of a content analysis of a representative sample of the national news in People's Daily (PD)and Southern Metropolitan Daily (SMD) in 2012 and 2013. PD is an official central Party organ that can be taken to articulate the canonical views of the leadership. SMD is a provincial level commercially-oriented newspaper that has frequently been censured for its critical views. Both titles fall within the 'disseminator-interventionist' model, although SMD gave more emphasis to dissemination while PD was more slanted towards interventionist. SMD was more likely to embody both the 'watchdog model' and the 'infotainment model' than PD, although in both cases these were very weakly represented. The results provided evidence of some important differences between titles. While political and economic news were the main topics in both, SMD was much more likely to carry material about police and court affairs and about accidents and disasters, confirming its status as a more 'popular' title aimed at the general reader. PD, as a national level newspaper, deploys more resources and its stories are more likely to be sourced from its own reporters, while SMD is more dependent upon wire stories. Stories sourced from SMD reporters have some important differences from those provided by the wire services. For example, SMD-sourced stories are more likely to use multiple sources and stories are more likely to cite different points of view. The main sources in both titles, however, are from the state and Communist Party. The evidence suggests that, while all Chinese media are dominated by official viewpoints, there are differences between titles. The Communist Party exercises control over the media in China, but it does not impose complete and total uniformity.