Claiming Legitimacy: Journalists’ Discursive Strategies for Rationalizing “Brand Propaganda” Within Chinese Local Press

ABSTRACT

In the past decade, the initiative of “brand propaganda,” a form of positive reporting on local governments in exchange of financial support, emerged within a few of China’s city-level and province-level press groups. Employing the theoretical perspective of journalistic legitimacy, this study investigates how involved local journalists rationalize this initiative and the implications it bears for the future of China’s local journalism. In-depth interviews with 17 journalists from the local press group X Daily suggest that brand propaganda is legitimized through a “story of survival” entailing discourses of balance, returning, and adaptation. The effects of brand propaganda on local press and the future of Chinese journalism are complicated by the interactions between individual journalists, local press markets, and the overall media-political environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalistic legitimacy
• Chinese local press
• journalism reform
• journalistic ideologies
• professionalism
• crisis of journalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use X to represent the local press group from which we recruited interviewees to protect confidentiality of interviewees.

2 Brand propaganda is an improvised and grassroot measure advanced with caution. We could not find official data or reports on the exact numbers of revenue attained from it. Interviewees’ statements were the only evidence we had access to.

Additional information

Funding

This research received a grant from the “Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities” (grant number 20720151015).