Contents and Effects of Newspaper Coverage of Talk Radio in Hong Kong: A Study of Remediation Through Content Adaptation

Abstract

Media outlets and platforms in contemporary societies do not operate in isolation, but are interconnected with each other in various ways. The influence and significance of a medium can therefore depend on what Bolter and Grusin (1999) labeled “remediation,” that is, the processes through which a medium is represented by other media. Content adaptation—the selective appropriation of the contents of another medium—is a specific means of remediation. This article applies these theoretical principles to the study of talk radio in Hong Kong. It examines how newspapers appropriate the contents of political talk radio and how content adaptation by the press affects people's perceptions of talk radio. Empirically, a content analysis shows that newspapers regularly cover talk radio contents, but the coverage is affected by the journalistic paradigms the newspapers adopt. Based on the content analysis, hypotheses about the relationships between news consumption, talk radio listening, and perceived value of talk radio are set up and tested by data from a representative survey (N = 862). The findings confirm the presence of “content adaptation effects.”

Acknowledgments

The research reported in this article is supported by a General Research Fund offered by the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong government to the author (Project No.: CUHK446409).

Notes

¹Only alternative years were included due to the practical concern of simplifying the act work process (i.e., the process of selecting relevant articles from the online news archive) involved in sampling. As a result of the procedure, two election years (2004 and 2008) were not included. However, as far as the research questions and hypotheses of the present study are concerned, the omission of the election years should not bias the results and conclusions in any substantial way.

²Newspapers in Hong Kong do not differentiate local news into a large number of sections. The majority of social news is simply covered in the general “Hong Kong news” section. Education news and political news constitute the exception in that at least some newspapers, including MP and STD, create separate sections for them. In other words, searching within the four sections—main news, Hong Kong news, education news, and political news—should allow us to cover all the major local social and political news reported by the newspapers.

³People older than 70 were not included in the study because senior citizens often had difficulties completing lengthy telephone interviews. Due to the proliferation of telephone surveys in Hong Kong, response rates for telephone surveys are often low. The current response rates are typical of survey research in contemporary Hong Kong.

⁴The sample was not weighted according to education partly for the sake of simplicity and partly due to the fact that weighting the sample by income has already substantially reduced the sample-population discrepancy in educational level.

⁵Details of operationalization and basic descriptive statistics of the controls are omitted due to space concerns. Information is available upon request.

Note. Cell entries for total number of sources, number of citizen sources, and number of official sources are means (i.e., the average number of different types of sources in each article). Cell entries for other rows are percentages of articles published by a type of newspapers containing the specified feature. Differences between mean scores tested with independent samples t tests. Differences between percentages were tested by cross-tabulation analysis.

*p < .05. **p < .01.

Note. Entries are standardized regression coefficients in the full model. Adjusted R² refers to the value for the whole model. N = 862.

*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001. ^# p < .06.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francis L. F. Lee

Francis L. F. Lee (Ph.D., Stanford University, 2003) is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include political communication, journalism studies, and media and social mobilization.