Reporting after removal: the effects of journalist expulsion on foreign news coverage.

This article examines the impact of government expulsions of foreign journalists on international media reporting, focusing on the March 2020 expulsion of correspondents from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post by the Chinese government. Using a novel dataset of over 32,000 English-language news articles about China and applying time-series causal inference methods, the study evaluates three theoretical outcomes of expulsion—chilling effect, resilience, and backlash—across information origination, composition, and reach. The findings indicate no statistically significant changes in these dimensions post-expulsion, suggesting that affected news organizations adapted their internal production processes, such as increasing collaborative reporting, to maintain coverage. The study highlights the resilience of major media organizations to direct disruptions but cautions that these results may not generalize to other contexts or longer timeframes.