Blog 5

1)     Progress report - How many interviews did you do so far? And/or how many materials (i.e. media texts) did you research, and how did you research on the texts – textual analysis, genre study, etc.?

 I had interview one people and researched 3 - 4 eassies about self-censorship of News medias including

1. Self-Censorship and the Press in Hong Kong  https://martindale.cc.lehigh.edu/sites/martindale.cc.lehigh.edu/files/Shemwell.pdf
2. Hong Kong ' s news media five years after the handover: Prospects for press freedom

http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1081&context=apme

3. The Effect of self-censorship on news credibility: public' s perception of Hong Kong newspapers after the 1997 Handover

http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4846&context=etd

These eassy analysed the statement of “the Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People's Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong”, and the credibility and shareholders change of the News media in these years. These eassy let me know more about the situation of Hong Kong and the reason of why their standpoint and points of views are so different. In addition, several opinion polls about how Hong Kong citizen think to the News media have analysed. Moveover, the background of the News medias group have included for drawing the findings.

I decided to focus on the “Ming Pao”, “Oriental Daily News”, “Apple Daily” about how these three newspaper describe “Fish ball revolution” on the 8 February, 2016. To see the standpoints of these newspaper group.

2)     Preliminary findings – What do you discover up till now? (For example, what are the commonalities amongst the texts/interviews?) How do your findings help you answer your research question?  

After reading these essay, I discover press freedom has declined with the development of closer economic and political ties with Mainland China after the 1997 handover. "Several media owners are current or former members of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament. Many have significant business connections in the mainland. Therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that news stories reflect mostly the interests of the dominant class. Even those that do not receive direct funding from Chinese businesses choose to stay away from stories that may cast the mainland in a negative light (Lee & Chen,2009). Self-censorship is now common in the newsrooms of Hong Kong." " Media critic Zhang Tao (2006) says that more and more self-censorship happens in Hong Kong because some media outlets have been acquired by big businesses with economic ties with China. Thus, they now serve their owners’ interests instead of functioning as advocates for the general public’s concerns."
Those are the reason why self-censorship happens in HK.