BOOK REVIEWS

Reporting Hong Kong — Foreign Media and the Handover, by Alan Knight and Yoshiko Nakano (eds.)

In 1997 many Hong Kong residents were astonished by the large crowd of journalists sent to provide “coverage” of the Territory’s handover, and whose self-assurance bordering on arrogance was not fully explored until the publication of this book.

These reporters all arrived, stuffed with preconceptions and/or with their script already prepared for publication, knowing better than any resident what was going to happen.

The authors of this volume, who were both participants (as journalists) and observers (as university teachers specialising in media studies), seek to provide some kind of response to this rather narrow attitude of the media.

As one of the journalists put it in a recent interview, “the Territory’s return to China was an event scripted in advance for marketing to the world’s media” (The Correspondent, September 1999, p. 11). Most Hong Kong residents were well aware that, apart from the official ceremonies, nothing would really happen on that day. But this was not so clear to the foreign correspondents who landed around June 20th, in a contingent about 6,000 strong—five times as many as those who covered the Cambodian elections of 1995, over twice as many as those who were in South Africa to cover Nelson Mandela’s accession to power, and even outnumbering the People’s Liberation Army soldiers who entered Hong Kong on July 1st! For them there could be no doubt that something serious was about to happen. The uncertainty of Hong Kong’s destiny held out the promise of something sensational, or at least sufficiently momentous to justify their journey and the enormous expense of the spectacle, which would have to be paid for by their readership.

In spite of all these expectations, however, as V. G. Kulkarni, the new chief editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review has pointed out: “Almost everybody wrote almost the same things. Visiting journalists were sceptical to the point of being cynical . They were looking for the darker side of the story but none of that happened. It went off very smoothly. Many reporters did the same story ; ... They (journalists) talked to the same old politicians and businessmen who had been newsmakers in stories in the past.. In the end, some of them just interviewed other journalists” (p. 13).

Alan Knight and Yoshiko Nakano, whose scrupulous documentation manages to avoid becoming boring, set out to show how this happened, that is, how such misinformation could have invaded and multiplied within the very heart of the modern information business, just when it considered itself beyond reproach. Their detailed analysis of the creative process, both “illustrate the process of media reporting as well as the product” (as they put it: p. xix), provides a close account of the rigid mechanisms which control the “fabrication” of news reports, and leave little room for providing that truthful description which is supposed to be the basis of journalistic ethics.

In the first section, the authors enumerate the difficulties of journalists being bombarded from different directions, the prepared and pre-packaged information from the Hong Kong Government Information Service (GIS), the different and sometimes contradictory versions purveyed to the press by political leaders (p. 42ff), and the demands from the various editorial offices with an eye on their readership (here the case of Newsweek is particularly interesting; see p. 66). It turns out that the reason why 90% of the media reported that, following an old Chinese tradition, Patten walked three times around the garden at Government House before leaving (whereas in fact he walked round one and a half times) was that this information had been put out in advance through a GIS communiqué. A few pages later, the authors observe that Martin Lee willingly gave out four different versions of his speech to the Legislative Council, and that, for commercial reasons, Asian readers of Newsweek had neither the same title nor the same cover as their American counterparts.

All this first section of the book tends to use the evidence to clear the journalists themselves of responsibility for the excessive manipulation of the press reports on the handover.

The whole of the first section of the book serves to substantiate this approach by illustrative examples. Through a close examination of the coverage of the handover in the Chinese, Japanese and English language press, the authors’ intention is to show that in each case “the press”—carefully distinguished from its journalists—merely echoed the interests of its own country of origin. That may seem absurd in our epoch of the globalisation of liberal values. And yet the three chosen examples—namely, a communist newspaper with modern technology at its disposal, two television networks traditionally and universally known for their freedom of expression, and a prosperous, politically neutral Japanese radio station—all reveal that it is conformism, not pluralism, which is the main characteristic of the media nowadays.

The Chinese press, widely reputed to be obedient to “his master’s voice”, is presented here in a more open and modern guise, since the only example that the authors focus on is the Guangzhou ribao. This newspaper rivals most modern Western papers in both commercial and technical terms, and is consequently light years away from the dusty old Remin ribao (People’s Daily) and the antiquated Xinhua News Agency. But despite its incredible success story, the Guangzhou ribao was unable to evade the imperial edicts from the press section of the Chinese Department of Propaganda (p. 84). Just as for six months Xinhua had totally omitted all reference to the Democrats, the main party in Hong Kong, and to their leader, Martin Lee, so this leading newspaper from southern China also remained silent on the demonstration which he organised in Legco on the night of June 30th.

The almost identical reports put out by the two supposedly rival English TV channels, the BBC and ITN, show that, despite their difference from the Chinese press, the latter was not alone in presenting a single version of the events. Steeped in nostalgia, and anxious to gratify both their expatriates and the “broad masses” of English viewers, they tended largely to play up the “end of Empire” angle in most of their reports; and through their images just as much as their commentaries, China came across as a warlike “invader” (for example, the images of the arrival of the PLA), and a greatly feared one (as came through in interviews with Hong Kong residents anxious about their future).

The Japanese press deployed large resources to cover this grand ceremony. The journalists from that “neutral” country were more numerous and apparently more independent. They certainly provided a more finely balanced political version of the event. Nonetheless, they also were unable to shake off the demands of their national interests. In the case of Japan these were more commercial than political, and they proved to be more of a constraint than was the case for other nationalities. In addition, the Japanese journalists suffered from a linguistic handicap, since Japanese is not widely spoken either in Hong Kong or in the world at large. This isolation was further highlighted by the need for live reporting. The authors succeed in demonstrating, in this case and in that of the American CNN channel, how live reporting is an obstacle to rather than a help in conveying the reality of events.

The quantity of information provided in the main body of the book, and the various testimonies to be found in the different chapters, make for stirring reading. But the conclusions, already outlined in the preface, fail to convince when the authors write: “How foreign journalists chose to report the handover, and what they decided to ignore about it, reveals much about foreign news agendas and how they are framed by ideological and cultural assumptions” (p. xviii).

The authors’ project of exonerating, or at least defending the journalists, therefore shifts the blame for the current conformism onto the all-powerful editorial boards in the service of national interests. The authors attack those who see in the coverage of this event the old opposition between the Leninist theory of a “responsible” press, acting as the voice of “higher” commercial or state interests, and the conception that holds that the only duty of a reporter is to his readers. Their alternative conception, however, is hardly more acceptable. Can one honestly contrast Western and Asian journalists? According to this view, the former are often “bad” when it comes to telling the facts as they are—a charge which can certainly be admitted—but are then “absolved” of all wrongdoing because they are held to be more responsive to the demands of their readers. By contrast, the latter, though more objective in their handling of real facts, are condemned for being spokesmen for the political and economic powers which they represent (p. 172).

The book itself shows, however, that the reality is much more complex, and that an absolute desire to highlight binary contradictions can only have the effect of stirring up somewhat outdated controversies.

Translated from French original by Jonathan Hall