SpringerBriefs in Political Science (BRIEFSPOLITICAL). Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2023. US$50.00, paper; US$40.00 ebook. ISBN 9783031275838.
While many books have been written about the climactic protests in Hong Kong over recent decades, A Free Press, If You Can Keep It instead contributes a longitudinal study. Using a mixture of natural language processing (NLP) techniques and qualitative analysis, the authors analyze changes to press freedom from 1998 to 2020. This 75-page book concludes that: “Beijing’s ability to influence Hong Kong-based newspapers [… has resulted in the] erosion of press freedom” (62). A Free Press raises provocative questions and is an interesting study of insidiousness, however some of its conclusions are unremarkable.
After an introduction in chapter 1, in chapter 2 the authors describe their sources: 4,522 newspaper articles about protests in Hong Kong. Articles from the South China Morning Post (SCMP) and China Daily represent Hong Kong while six British and American broadsheets represent Western newspapers. The authors explain that they only use English-language articles because it is difficult to conduct NLP analyses across languages (11) and justify using print rather than online versions because of its greater permanence (12). The authors do not, however, explain why they choose these six Western newspapers nor explore their editorial biases. Additionally, while it is implicit that Western papers represent press freedom against which Hong Kong papers can be compared, the authors never argue this explicitly. They also do not say why, if cross-language analysis is difficult, they did not compare Chinese-language Hong Kong newspapers with Chinese-language non-Hong Kong newspapers. Lastly, there is an unacknowledged mismatch between the authors’ sources and the presumed media consumption habits of the majority of protest participants; as most protesters were young, digitally savvy, and Cantonese speaking, it is doubtful that they got their news from print copies of English-language American and British newspapers.
Chapter 3 explores non-rhetorical tactics and draws two main findings: first, that “[b]y the time [W]estern-based media began paying systematic attention to […] Hong Kong, the SCMP and the China Daily had set the agenda” (23). If the authors mean that Western papers aped Hong Kong papers’ reportage, this is easily disproven: Western papers had their own reporters on the ground. If, however, they mean that that the Hong Kong public took their news only from Hong Kong papers, the authors present no evidence for it. Secondly, the authors discover that “an increase in news coverage is followed by an increase in citizens’ participation” (26). The value of this conclusion is undermined by refusing to draw a causal connection from this correlation (24), failing to explore in depth other possible factors, and the aforementioned mismatch between sources and protesters. Moreover, neither of the two main findings in chapter 3 say much about press freedom and instead say more about the influence of the press upon the public.
In chapter 4, the authors survey rhetorical tactics. First, they explore framing—that is, choosing to make certain topics most salient. They find that Hong Kong newspapers’ journalists and Western newspapers’ journalists chose similar framing but used framing in different ways. Western papers used framing to promote support for the protesters; Hong Kong papers used the same framing but to delegitimize protesters. The authors argue, without evidence, this “increases the likelihood of readers agreeing with [… their] standpoint” (34). They also find that SCMP “manage[d] the protesters’ narrative” by portraying them as a “group apart from the overwhelming majority” while reiterating that Hong Kong is a finance capital (42). The authors ignore that these are uncontentious descriptions: Hong Kong is finance-centric and, while surveys showed that a majority supported the protesters’ cause, protesters were themselves in the minority. The authors also fail to explicitly connect any of these comments with press freedom.
Also in chapter 4, the authors find that Hong Kong newspapers focused on descriptive details while Western articles unpacked the meanings behind the protests using value-laden terms like democracy and freedom. They do not counter the argument that Western papers reported on protests less frequently, so their articles gave greater context by dwelling on protesters’ values, whereas Hong Kong papers were descriptive because they reported on events day-to-day. Moreover, these findings are inconsistent with the authors’ own “embedding neighbourhoods” analysis that shows Western newspapers used a neutral or descriptive lexicon (51). Lastly, through headline analysis, the authors conclude that all papers chose language for the “representations they wanted to circulate within Hong Kong” (59). The reader is left wondering what evidence there is that Western papers sought to circulate representations in Hong Kong, how large the Hong Kong readership for those Western papers is, and how the authors believe representations are transmitted from newspapers to the Hong Kong public.
There are typos, grammatical issues, and typographical inconsistencies in this study as well. Referencing is also poor: there is no “Lam, 2004” (45) in the bibliography and no “Lee, 2007” (62) but instead 2007a and 2007b, the latter of which is mistitled. Footnotes are difficult to navigate; for instance, chapter 5 fn. 7 refers to fn. 6, fn. 6 to fn. 14, and fn. 14 is an “Ibid” of fn. 13. Lastly, ironically for a study of language choices, the authors’ use of certain phrases is questionable: “Beijing regained sovereignty” and “Tiananmen Square incidents [sic]” (2), for example, hold pro-Beijing connotations.
Insidiousness is difficult to study because incremental change often slips by unnoticed; the authors of A Free Press therefore deserve commendation for attempting to analyze change over time. This short study is, however, undermined by little engagement with counterarguments, poor production values and referencing, and sources that need further defence and appear mismatched with the protesters that supposedly consumed them. Lastly, the overall conclusion that press freedom has been eroded in Hong Kong is unsurprising.
Matthew Hurst
University of York, York