Most past research on Hong Kong has been generally aimed to inform a diverse audience about the place and its people. Beginning in the 1950s, the aim of scholars and journalists who came to Hong Kong was to study China, which had not yet opened its doors to fieldwork by outsiders. Accordingly, the relevance of Hong Kong was limited to its status as a society adjacent to mainland China. After the opening of China, research on Hong Kong shifted focus towards colonial legitimacy and the return of sovereignty. Thus, the disciplined study of Hong Kong was hindered for almost half...

Communicating public opinion is one of the most important roles of the mass media in contemporary societies. While government leaders and politicians may have other means by which to gauge public opinion, and citizens can use interpersonal communication and observation of their surroundings to get a sense of what other people think about public matters (Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1995), all remain largely reliant on the media to inform them about what the society at large is thinking (Mutz, 1998). Media representations of public opinion may have strong or weak factual bases, but both politicians and ordinary people tend to act...

Since the late 1990s, the Hong Kong news media has often used the term fung-jin zit-muk (烽煙節目) to refer to public affairs radio phone-in talk shows. Whilezit-mukis the Chinese term for “program,”fung-jinliterally refers to the smoke coming out from fire beacons. The use of the termfung-jinis partly due to its closeness to “phone-in” in pronunciation. But the term also brings with it the association with the Chinese phrasefung-jin sei-hei(烽煙四起)—smoke from fire beacons rises on all sides—a phrase often used to describe the situation of the battlefield or times of radio...

In the popular imagination, the characteristics of a radio talk show are often attributed to the personality and style of the host. Indeed, famous talk show hosts often become cultural icons in a society (Halper, 2009). In Hong Kong, talk show hosts such as Albert Cheng and Wong Yuk-man gained the iconic status of being theming zeoi(名嘴) of the city in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Following this line of thinking, it seems that a talk show of a certain type could be produced simply by identifying a suitable host.

In reality, the production of a radio...

Chapter 3 provides an analysis of the production of RTHK’sOpen Line Open View, which was representative of thefung-jingenre. This chapter turns to analyze the other type of phone-in programs—the accountability shows that involve top government officials or other types of studio guests directly communicating with the general public—that has become prominent in Hong Kong since the turn of the century. Within the context of post-handover Hong Kong, this type of radio programs can be regarded as one of the major ways through which government officials perform their accountability to public. If handled successfully, attendance on...

After analyzing the production of two types of radio phone-in shows, this chapter begins the analysis of the remediation of talk radio by the mainstream press. It does so by focusing on how the mainstream press treats talk radio as a platform for public expression and utilizes the medium as a means to report on public opinion.

One of the most consistently reported findings about journalism throughout the past decades is its overwhelming focus on what elite people do and say (Brookes, Lewis and Wahl-Jorgensen, 2004; Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Gans, 1980). Ordinary people are located at the bottom of...

The analysis of the previous chapter is based on the working assumption that, as mainstream newspapers occupy a specific position in the larger system of political communication in the city, they are generally motivated to make use of talk radio content in specific ways. Yet there are also nonnegligible variations within the press system in Hong Kong. For decades, the Hong Kong press system has exhibited a significant degree of political parallelism (Chan and Lee, 1991), in that media organizations represent a range of different political viewpoints parallel to the spectrum of political factions existing in the society. In terms...

One widely observed phenomenon in political communication in Western democracies in the past two decades is the shrinking sound bite in television news (Adatto, 1990; Bucy and Grabe, 2007; Hallin, 1992; Esser, 2008; Whaley and Holloway, 1997). This phenomenon is commonly understood as the result of continual media commercialization and the rise of an interventionist journalistic culture. More broadly, the preference for catchy statements over lengthy speeches can be taken as an important feature of contemporary political and media culture (Scheuer, 1999). Nevertheless, while existing studies have documented and explained the shrinking sound bites in news, few have systematically analyzed...

Freedom of speech and of the press has been a core concern in Hong Kong since the confirmation of the city’s return to China in 1997. It is sometimes even used as the yardstick against which the success of “one country, two systems” is measured. Talk radio took up its specific role and significance for Hong Kong within a context in which freedom of speech constituted a major concern. The development of talk radio was tied to the ways in which increasing pressure on the mainstream media led to the establishment of an informal alliance between talk radio and the...

After illustrating how talk radio has been featured in the news, this chapter draws upon data from a representative survey to examine the profile of talk radio listeners and callers as well as to interrogate into remediation effects. What are the demographic characteristics of the talk radio listeners and callers in Hong Kong? Past research has shown that talk radio listeners held more pro-democracy views, were more likely to engage in interpersonal political discussion, and were more likely to engage in political participation (Lee, 2002, 2007b). Do these characteristics still hold?

More important, this chapter examines if the remediation processes...

In this book, I have examined the efficacy of political radio phone-in talk shows in communicating public opinion in post-handover Hong Kong. Three interrelated arguments underlie the analyses throughout the different chapters. First, the main character and social roles of radio phone-in programs should be understood in relation to the social and political context at large. Chapter 1 points out that broadcast audience participation talk shows take up different character and social roles in different societies. In the case of Hong Kong, as Chapter 2 illustrates, talk radio’s prominence and significance has varied over the past four decades as social...