Cross-Country News Attention to Countries and Leaders in the G20

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Anton Kazun, whose interest is in the global news flow around the G20 group of countries. International news are important to our perceptions of other countries and their leaders, but state politics, ideology, and news frames will affect this; further, news attention to different countries is never equal. Factors that increase attention to different countries include GDP, population size, and links through common borders, trade, tourism, and migration.

The personalisation of politics in each country also means that attention may be directed especially to a country’s leader, and this is also affected by a range of other political and economic factors.

The present study gathered articles from the top five news outlets in 19 of the G20 countries (excluding the EU) during 2018 that covered any of the other 18 countries and/or their leaders; in total, this captured some 2.2 million news articles. This was converted into a network of mentions of countries and their leaders between different countries, with further incorporation of economic, geographic, cultural, and political factors.

In this analysis, global news flow for the G20 turns out to be largely centred around the United States, and most of the key countries are also members of the smaller G8 grouping; for the leaders, too, U.S. president Donald Trump is – somewhat unsurprisingly – a central point of attention. Attention to the U.S. is some 23 times as great as attention to the least visible country, South Africa. Interestingly, Russia is in seventh place as a country, but its leader Vladimir Putin is in second place.

Important factors here that increase attention to countries appear to be their GDP and geographic country size; geographic distance between countries as well as the size of the population decrease attention. For leaders, shared borders and languages also seem to be important predictors. Low levels of political stability also mean that countries and especially leaders will receive more attention; the same also goes for countries involved in violent conflicts.

In the case of Russia, Turkey, and the U.S., leaders and countries will often be mentioned alongside each other; this is not true for countries such as Brazil (before the election of Jair Bolsonaro) or Italy, for instance.