WAPOR 73rd Annual Conference

On October 6-10 2020, WAPOR 73rd Annual Conference was held online for the first time. Senior research fellow Anton Kazun presented his paper (co-author Anastasia Kazun) "Global News Flow in G-20: Economic and Political Factors of Media Attention".

Abstract:  The paper analyzes the global news flow in the G-20 countries in 2018. For the analysis we use the global news database Dow Jones Factiva, which includes nearly 33,000 media from 159 countries of the world. We compiled a list of 5 leading print media for each of the G-20 countries and coded the number of mentions of all G-20 countries in each of them. Based on the created matrices with mutual mentions of the G-20 countries, we build networks: in the center of the network there are countries that are more often mentioned in leading foreign print media, and on the periphery those who are less often mentioned in the media. Existing literature (Golan, 2008; Guo & Vargo, 2017; Kim & Barnett, 1996; Segev, 2015; Wu, 2000; Wu, 2007) generally indicates that the global news flow could be generally explained with economic factors (GDP, trade etc.). We show that the situation is more complicated: interest to some countries could be largely explained with economic factors, while the interest to other countries depend on political factors (for example, participation in international conflicts, level of democracy etc.). We build regression models to show and to compare the influence of political and economic factors. The analysis also shows a high degree of inequality between countries in media attention the degree of which can also be explained by economic and political factors. 

The presentation is avaliable here: G20_Kazun_Kazun.ppt