![]() ![]() ![]() Academics studying election interference or practitioners trying to respond to it have always had to grapple with the challenge of lacking shared definitions as well as the problems of timely identification and attribution when it comes to malicious cybersecurity operations (Martin et al., 2019). These news values reveal CGTN’s geopolitical function: to convey Chinese media’s apparent impartiality, while promoting China at its competitors’ expense. We identify three news values differentiating CGTN’s coverage: deference, relevance (to China), and national sovereignty. Contrastingly, its geopolitical coverage of the US and China was entirely one-sided, persistently excoriating the US while praising China. CGTN’s coverage was mostly cautious and neutral. Tellingly, it finds no concerted effort to influence the outcome. It examines CGTN’s coverage of the election and the 2021 Capitol riots, across its website, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. This article asks whether China used its state-sponsored media to influence the 2020 US election. In comparison, we know less about how China’s international news outlets cover – and try to influence – other countries’ politics. Some states have instrumentalised this news geopolitically, with Russian electoral interference especially prominent. Recently, authoritarian states have invested heavily in state-sponsored international news. One potential danger of using them to present disinformation as being solely, or predominantly, the tools of geopolitical opponents, is that it will lead to a form of self-contamination that compromises a state's ability to respond to situations of potential international conflict, and thus heighten tension and instability in international affairs. However, as with the use of viruses as a tool of war, there is a risk that narratives will mutate, growing in strength or scope beyond what was originally intended. Within state-driven propaganda, one tactic that has made very effective use of the growth of the Internet is the establishment and dissemination of 'memetic narratives', belief structures that shape our understanding of how the world works, which are embedded within and spread among target populations. The propagation of disinformation by the state is one aspect of information war, another element of which is the art of propaganda. One way this might occur is by labelling such tactics as a tool of 'the other' and obscuring or denying their use by one's own state. However, there is also a danger that the framing of discussion about 'disinformation' can itself be used as a tool of manipulation. The danger of unreliable information, whether shared by politicians, media outlets, or random individuals through the Internet, is especially severe during times of crisis. In the aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential elections, the issue of 'fake news' and disinformation increasingly became a major focus of political analysis. ![]()
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