Content analysis of pro-nationalist, pro-state propaganda in Xinhua?

I was reading journal articles about Chinese journalism last night. One of the main trends that communication scholars like to study is how Chinese media handled its propaganda mandate while expanding commercial activities in the 1980s and 1990s. There was an interesting case study involving the Beijing Youth News, and how it turned into a competitive mass-market publication, while serving as a propaganda model for other Chinese media following the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. One point the authors of this study brought up was the paper itself had its own yearly campaigns starting in 1990 to boost nationalist sentiment and support for the government -- "Socialism is good," and "China's modern history," are two examples. These campaigns were started before the central government requested more emphasis on these issues -- i.e., journalists acted on their own to create propaganda, rather than being told to do so by the government, although later directives reaffirmed the paper's decision to carry out these campaigns.

But this made me think ... if the central government also issued directives to the media for more emphasis on nationalist and pro-socialist feeling, to counter the "Western" influences that capitalism brought to the country, that should be reflected in Xinhua domestic (i.e., Chinese) copy for sure, and perhaps even for the English service.

Here's an idea for a content analysis, using LexisNexis searches on Xinhua: Take every month in 1985 to 1995, and perform very structured searches for certain indicators that would reflect pro-socialist, pro-state, or pro-nationalist support. The analysis would test for all articles in the lead paragraphs (which I believe would indicate direct propoganda) as well as in other parts of the article (which I hypothesize indicate an attempt to infuse pro-socialist or nationalist thought in other types of stories). I actually had a similar idea before, but didn't really think it through, after other topics attracted my attention.

The tricky part would be identifying the indicators. Some obvious candidates include "Socialism", "motherland," as well as campaign slogans and mentions of imperialist actions that form the basis for modern Chinese nationalism. The other tricky issue would be the searches -- they would need to be focussed and control for other types of news items that may contain these indicators but have nothing to do with China or propaganda.

My tentative hypothesis: Xinhua coverage would change dramatically, following the 1989 incident, the start of official propaganda campaigns, and perhaps following the promotion or demotion of certain leaders and Xinhua managers. The data from the content analysis would allow me to measure these trends, and allow for additional analysis.

What would be really interesting, though, would be to incorporate an analysis on Xinhua's Chinese service, and compare it with what the English service says.

Some preliminary testing is in order ... I'll give it a shot this weekend, if it's not too hot in my study.