Research Seminar: ‘The limits of State-sponsored media (contra)flows: ‘Measuring’ influence in global communication’

This talk presents two projects on China's media influence in Africa: one examines Chinese satellite TV in rural Kenya, and the other one focuses on Chinese content in African digital news outlets

Academic debates on global information flows have seen multiple stages of development. Concerns around their unidirectionality in the 1980s, gave way to studies on the role of transnational media corporations in the 1990s, and were followed by discussions on the potentially transformative role of technology in the 2000s.More recent scholarship has begun shifting focus to the return of the State in global communication. From the proliferation of State-sponsored international broadcasters to the adoption of social media platforms as tool of public diplomacy, State actors, many of which based in non-democratic countries, are growing ubiquitous in global communication. The impact of these State-sponsored mediated activities is poorly understood and often evaluated via readily available proxy quantitative measures, such as investment metrics or social media engagement. During this seminar, two ongoing projects that explore alternative ways to assess the impact of State-sponsored media flows from China to Sub-Saharan Africa will be presented. The first project looks at the reception of Chinese satellite television in rural Kenya, while the second one surveys the presence of Beijing-sponsored political narratives in digital news outlets from two dozen African countries.

Dani Madrid-Morales is a Lecturer at the Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield, where he co-leads the Disinformation Research Cluster. Prior to this, he worked as an Assistant Professor at the Valenti School of Communication, University of Houston, and was a Hong Kong PhD Fellow, at City University of Hong Kong. He studies global political communication, with a focus on the impact of new digital technologies in the production of State-sponsored news, global public opinion, and misinformation in the Global South. He has published extensively on Africa-China mediated relations, particularly on the reception of Chinese media content in Kenya and South Africa. His latest book, co-edited with Herman Wasserman, is Disinformation in the Global South (Wiley).