Extensive research in Western societies has demonstrated that media reports of protests have succumbed to selection and description biases, but such tendencies have not yet been tested in the Chinese context. This article investigates the Chinese government and news media's selection and description bias in domestic protest events reporting. Using a large protest event data set from Weibo (CASM-China), we found that government accounts on Weibo covered only 0.4 per cent of protests while news media accounts covered 6.3 per cent of them. In selecting events for coverage, the news media accounts tacitly struck a balance between newsworthiness and political sensitivity; this led them to gravitate towards protests by underprivileged social groups and shy away from protests targeting the government. Government accounts on Weibo, on the other hand, eschewed reporting on violent protests and those organized by the urban middle class and veterans. In reporting selected protest events, both government and news media accounts tended to depoliticize protest events and to frame them in a more positive tone. This description bias was more pronounced for the government than the news media accounts. The government coverage of protest events also had a more thematic (as opposed to episodic) orientation than the news media.

This paper investigates three controversies involving potential causes and consequences of information bias in case and death definitions during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. First, evidence suggests China’s surveillance data were biased and misinterpreted by the World Health Organization (WHO), prompting the WHO to advise nations to copy China’s lockdowns. China appeared to use narrow diagnostic definitions that undercounted cases and deaths. Second, novel genomic data disseminated during the pandemic without adequate guidance from rigorous epidemiologic studies biased infection control policies in many countries. A novel genomic sequence of a virus is insufficient to declare new cases of a novel disease. Third, media reports of COVID-19 surveillance data in many nations appeared to be biased. Broadened surveillance definitions captured additional information, but unadjusted surveillance data disseminated to the public are not true cases and deaths. Recommendations include clarification of the proper use of diagnostic and surveillance case and death definitions to avoid information bias.

This paper explores how factional competition shapes local media's coverage of negative political news. Employing news reports that appeared in Chinese national and local newspapers (2000–2014) coupled with data on the networks of elites, we find that local bureaucrats connected to strong national leaders tend to criticize members of weaker factions in politically damaging news reports. These adverse reports indeed harm the promotion prospects of the province leaders reported on in the articles, weakening the already weak factions and expanding the relative power of the strong factions. Our findings suggest that the loyalty-based competitive behaviors of political elites further tilt an already uneven playing field across political factions and facilitate power concentration in China.

In recent years, concerns about misinformation in the media have skyrocketed. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that various news outlets are disseminating ‘fake news’ for political purposes. But when the information contained in mainstream media news reports provides no clear clues about its truth value or any indication of a partisan slant, do people rely on the congeniality of the news outlet to judge whether the information is true or false? In a survey experiment, we presented partisans (Democrats and Republicans) and ideologues (liberals and conservatives) with a news article excerpt that varied by source shown (CNN, Fox News, or no source) and content (true or false information), and measured their perceived accuracy of the information contained in the article. Our results suggest that the participants do not blindly judge the content of articles based on the news source, regardless of their own partisanship and ideology. Contrary to prevailing views on the polarization and politicization of news outlets, as well as on voters' growing propensity to engage in ‘partisan motivated reasoning,’ source cues are not as important as the information itself for partisans on both sides of the aisle.

This research explores media reporting of Indigenous students’ Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results in two national and 11 metropolitan Australian newspapers from 2001 to 2015. Of almost 300 articles on PISA, only 10 focused on reporting of Indigenous PISA results. While general or non-Indigenous PISA results featured in media reports, especially at the time of the publication of PISA results, there was overwhelming neglect of Indigenous results and the performance gap. A thematic analysis of articles showed mainstream PISA reporting had critical commentary which is not found in the Indigenous PISA articles. The three themes identified include: a lack of teacher quality in remote and rural schools; the debate on Gonski funding recommendations and the PISA achievement gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. This study concluded the overwhelming neglect is linked to media bias, which continues to drive mainstream media coverage of Indigenous Australians.