Media and politics in Hong Kong: A decade after the handover

Hong Kong has been through numerous ups and downs in the ten years since the handover. The media have also undergone significant changes in relation to the larger social and political reconfigurations. While the press, driven by market forces and professional ideologies, has continued to provide timely information to the public and to monitor the behavior of power holders, the power center has employed various means to tame the media, and selfcensorship remains a haunting issue.

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Changing Political Economy of the Hong Kong Media

ABSTRACT: Most observers argued that press freedom in Hong Kong has been declining continually over the past 15 years. This article examines the problem of press freedom from the perspective of the political economy of the media. According to conventional understanding, the Chinese government has exerted indirect influence over the Hong Kong media through co-opting media owners, most of whom were entrepreneurs with ample business interests in the mainland. At the same time, there were internal tensions within the political economic system. The latter opened up a space of resistance for media practitioners and thus helped the media system as a whole to maintain a degree of relative autonomy from the power centre. However, into the 2010s, the media landscape has undergone several significant changes, especially the worsening media business environment and the growth of digital media technologies. These changes have affected the cost-benefit calculations of media ownership and led to the entrance of Chinese capital into the Hong Kong media scene. The digital media arena is also facing the challenge of intrusion by the state. KEYWORDS: press freedom, political economy, self-censorship, digital media, media business, Hong Kong.

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