The study “Propaganda during Economic Crises: Reference Point Adjustment in Economic News” by Fatih Serkant Adiguzel from Sabancı University, Istanbul, argued that government-controlled media increases negative reports about foreign economies in times of economic turmoil to make the local situation seem better – at least in Turkey, where the study is located, but the author suggests that this may be true of other democratically backsliding regimes.
The central question of the study is this: “how do governments in electoral autocracies manipulate and manage economic news during economic crises” . The author introduces a new concept to understand the phenomenon of news management in these countries: “reference point adjustment”.
To analyze the phenomenon, the researcher analyzed the entire corpora of two Turkish newspapers, one of which was pro-government and the other opposition-aligned, and the corpus of a state-owned internet outlet in Turkey for over 2,5 years. A total of 700.000 articles comprised the materials for the study. The analysis was conducted on the level of sentences (approximately 13.3 million unique sentences).
The hypotheses to guide the study were:
H1: Pro-government outlets cover foreign economies more than the opposition media during a domestic economic crisis.
H2: Negative foreign economic news exposure is higher in pro-government outlets relative to the opposition media during a domestic economic crisis.
Turkey’s economic woes were related to interest rates, when President Erdoğan fired the head of the Central Bank for increasing the interest rates – making it clear that the president. Later, the inflation and interest rates were essentially the same, and the president further signalled/forced lower interest rates – leading to the depreciation of the lira. This, in turn, led to inflation – as high as 127% in 2023.
The sites analyzed were: Sabah, TRT, and Sözcü. TRT is the state-owned outlet, while Sabah is pro-government, and Sözcü is pro-opposition. The privately owned newspapers were the most read papers in Turkey, and the state-owned outlet was added due to the desire to have a government-owned outlet in the sample.
It was revealed that the pro-government outlets: Sabah and TRT published more foreign economy news than their opposition counterpart – more than 16% on the average. On the average, they published three more articles daily on foreign economy – 38% more. However, more support is needed for the reference point adjustment. But after a more thorough analysis, this was also supported.
The author notes that although the data comes from an electoral autocracy, partisan media in democratic countries might apply the same kind of strategies to support incumbents – but the feasibility of such strategies is limited due to the variety of news sources. This is an intriguing area for future research, as would be comparing other autocratic regimes and their news strategies.
The article “Propaganda during Economic Crises: Reference Point Adjustment in Economic News” by Fatih Serkant Adiguzel is in Political Communication. (Free abstract).
Picture: Untitled by Cosmin Mîndru.
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