Intermedia Attribute Agenda-Setting Among Hong Kong, U.S. and Mainland Chinese Media: The Case of Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Bill Protests

ABSTRACT

Mainland: This study investigates the intermedia agenda-setting (IAS) relationships among major newspapers in Hong Kong, the U.S. and mainland China concerning the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests. It builds on the protest paradigm to characterize the news attributes adopted by leading media outlets and examined the transfer of attribute agendas at both regional and international levels. A total of 9,646 news items were content analyzed. Granger causality tests revealed that mainland Chinese media were the primary agenda-setter among the three, contrary to previous findings that media agendas mostly flow from the U.S. to other countries. Hong Kong newspapers exerted a bottom-up influence on their U.S. counterparts, setting the attribute agenda regarding Chinese authority and international society. A breakdown of the Hong Kong press into three political camps showed diverse IAS relationships. The findings testify to the co-existence of dominant flows and contra-flows in regional and international news flows and imply that organizational and socio-cultural factors can potentially influence IAS.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2022.2151918.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yining Fan

Yining Fan is a Ph.D. student at the School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research investigates comparative journalism in transnational settings, journalism practice in Greater China, and news dissemination on social media. Her current project focuses on mental health conversations on Chinese social media.

Vincent P. Wong

Vincent P. Wong is a pioneer in promoting solutions journalism in Asia, with more than 25 years of industry experience. He has hosted Hong Kong Commercial Radio's evening show, ”Our Way Out”, a program dedicated to promoting solutions journalism from 2014 to 2022. He got an M.B.A. and an LL.B. from the Cambridge University and University of London, respectively. His research focuses on the narratives of Sino-US conflicts.