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Most observers argued that press freedom in Hong Kong has been declining continually over the past 15 years. This article examines the problem of press freedom from the perspective of the political economy of the media. According to conventional understanding, the Chinese government has exerted indirect influence over the Hong Kong media through co-opting media owners, most of whom were entrepreneurs with ample business interests in the mainland. At the same time, there were internal tensions within the political economic system. The latter opened up a space of resistance for media practitioners and thus helped the media system as a whole to maintain a degree of relative autonomy from the power centre. However, into the 2010s, the media landscape has undergone several significant changes, especially the worsening media business environment and the growth of digital media technologies. These changes have affected the cost-benefit calculations of media ownership and led to the entrance of Chinese capital into the Hong Kong media scene. The digital media arena is also facing the challenge of intrusion by the state. (China Perspect/GIGA)

This study examines how political cynicism and social media communications moderate the spillover effects of political scandals, that is, the extent to which a scandal surrounding one political figure may influence people's attitudes toward other political objects. Theoretically, spillover effects are understood as grounded in how people understand the interconnections among politicians and institutions. Analysis of a representative survey in Hong Kong documents the presence of spillover effects of scandals surrounding the Chief Executive of the government. The findings also illustrate the moderating role of political cynicism and, to a lesser extent, political communications via social media.

Public opinion not only influences the likelihood of success for a protest movement; images of public opinion can also be used to legitimize or delegitimize a protest. In contemporary societies, opinion polling is the most authoritative way to "measure" public opinion. Yet the meanings of poll findings need to be interpreted and are often contested. Following these premises, this article analyzes the construction of images of public opinion through polling during the Umbrella Movement. The analysis illustrates the discursive strategies involved in selective reporting of opinion polls by newspapers with different political stances. It also demonstrates how poll results were articulated with other assumptions, principles, and discourses to generate claims about the legitimacy or proper strategies of the movement. On the whole, the analysis shows how public opinion, as a discursive category, was brought to bear on the dynamics of the Umbrella Movement through polling and its communication.

Communication scholars have articulated the concept of protest paradigm to capture the news media's tendency to portray social protests as deviant, threatening, or impotent. Developments in the media and social environment have led to more diversified media representations of protests, however. Correspondingly, scholars have started to treat the protest paradigm as a variable. Extending this line of research, this study content-analyzed Hong Kong newspaper coverage of protests. The results show that the protest paradigm is more likely to emerge if the protest involved radical tactics, if the protest's target responded to the media, and, in politically conservative newspapers, when the protest addressed political topics. Protest coverage is less negative when the protest addressed a political matter, and there is evidence that protest coverage has become less negative over time.

This study examines the impact of historical events on contemporary public opinion through the case of Hong Kong people's attitude toward the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident in China. It analyzes whether attitude toward Tiananmen continues to shape present political attitudes and beliefs. Moreover, drawing upon theories and research on collective memory, this study examines generational differences in the significance of an historical event. Analysis of data from two surveys consistently shows that the linkages between attitude toward Tiananmen and other political attitudes are strongest among people older than 25 in 1989. The findings defied the "critical age hypothesis" in collective memory research, but are consistent with the emerging "event content perspective" regarding the influence of historical events on different generations. Adapted from the source document.

Past studies have found contradicting evidence regarding the influence of political discussion with disagreeing others on political participation. This study argues that the impact of discussion with disagreement is likely to depend on the type of participatory activities involved. It conceptualizes a distinction between position-taking and nonposition-taking activities. The former refers to activities designed to have potential participants taking up a set position on a specific matter, whereas the latter refers to activities not designed as such. It is argued that discussion with disagreeing others is likely to suppress participation in position-taking activities, since such activities leave lesser room for participants to express the complexities of and possible ambivalence in their views. In contrast, discussion with disagreeing others may encourage participation in nonposition-taking activities. Relevant hypotheses are tested with a survey conducted in Hong Kong examining the impact of discussion and disagreement on voting, protest participation, and calling into talk radio.

While past research has shown that the news media can mobilize citizens for voting participation, little has been done on the determinants of the level of attention paid by the media to elections. Drawing on theories of news production, this study postulates that considerations of news values and the dynamics of resource allocation would combine to shape the quantity of election news. The empirical analysis focuses on a local election in Hong Kong, in which the news media paid different levels of attention to the contests in different constituencies. It shows that characteristics of the electoral contests relevant to the news values of prominence and conflict can explain how much coverage a constituency received, and the influences of news values factors can be interactive as well as additive. At the same time, the influence of resource allocation is illustrated by a relatively stronger media focus on the contests in urban center areas as well as the support for a resource spillover hypothesis. The general implications of the findings are discussed.