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We explore the official state news agencies’ digital platforms of 10 Arab countries depict the “Arab Spring.” We argue that these agencies serve as “discursive propagators” because their outreach is widespread throughout the media ecosystem and are regarded as one of the only official sources of news on the protest movements in these respective countries. This article makes two main original contributions to the field of digital journalism. First, it introduces the theoretical concept of discursive propagators that addresses the often neglected information impact of state-run news agencies operating in authoritarian states and their influence on other news media. By examining this seldom studied area of news production in the region, we are able to glean some news content that has the potential of influencing Arabic news media. Second, the study examines a unique Arabic language dataset and analyzes it using topic modelling and other digital approaches that are not often employed in the analysis of Arabic news. The analysis of digital state news agency coverage is contextualized to provide more insight into this digital type of content that often sets the tone of local journalistic production about the Arab Spring and other politically sensitive issues.
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Al‐Rawi et al. (2021) studied this question.
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