Taking Message-Attitude Congruence as Media Effects: Examining Perceived Influence of Political Talk Radio in Hong Kong

Abstract

This study examines how people perceive the influence of political talk radio in Hong Kong. Theoretically, the study focuses on the influence of message-attitude congruence, that is, the situation in which a person's opinions or attitudes are consistent with the viewpoints promulgated by media messages, on the third-person perception. It is argued that message-attitude congruence provides a situation in which people may attribute their attitudes partly to media influence. Hence message-attitude congruence is expected to relate to increased levels of perceived media influence on self, and thereby weaken the size of the third-person differential. Moreover, it is hypothesized that attribution of media influence should be more likely when people perceive the media influence as desirable and when there is the absence of alternative sources of influence. These arguments were tested with a telephone survey (N = 800) in Hong Kong, where political talk radio has been a prominent medium in the past decade. The results support the theoretical arguments and contribute to our understanding of the significance of the medium in the city. The broader theoretical implications of the findings are also discussed.

Notes

This article is supported by a General Research Fund Grant given to the author by the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong government (Project no.: CUHK446049).

***p < .001

**p < .01

*p < .05.

¹The protest, organized on July 1, 2003, was mainly opposing the then imminent national security legislation. It was participated in by 500,000 citizens and arguably reinvigorated the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. See Chan and Lee (2007).

²The lower age limit was set at 15 to include teenagers who may nonetheless have clear political judgments, whereas people over 70 often have difficulty completing a telephone survey interview.

³It should be noted that the general attitudinal support for democracy and the behavior of pro-democracy protest participation may need to be separated from each other for other research purposes (e.g., when one wants to explain political participation). But for the purpose of the present study, both indicate the presence of the same kind of message-attitude congruence. Combining the two thus also serves the purpose of maintaining parsimony.

⁴The scores were calculated using the following parameters: sex = male, age = 31–40, education = college, income = above 20,000 to 30,000 Hong Kong dollars per month, internal efficacy and perceived efficacy of Hong Kong people = mid-point of the scale (i.e., 3), TV news watching and newspaper reading = 31–45 minutes per day, newspaper readership = not readers of Apple Daily or Ming Pao, talk radio listening = sometimes. Low, medium and high levels of perceived representative-ness refer to the numerical scores of 1, 5, and 9 respectively on the 0–10 scale. Strongly supporting democratization, strongly opposing democratization, and neutral refer to the numerical scores of 1.5, −1.5, and 0 respectively on the index of support for democratization.

⁵The parameters are mostly the same as those used in constructing Figure 1, with the exception that perceived representativeness is set at 5, the mid-point of the scale, while newspaper readership varies (i.e., either 1 or 0).