Global Media Spectacle: News War over Hong Kong

Preface

xi Preface If journalists are said to write the first draft of history, what kind of a history will they be writing in the age of globalized media? Does this history appear to be littered with contrived images and dramas, hyped media events, and ideologically soaked catchy phrases? All global news is local. How do the media—operating as a “twenty-four-hour ideological repair shop” (van Ginneken, 1998:32)—mold international news in accordance with national interest, domestic politics, and the prevailing cultural values? Sighting this scene of international newsmaking from a hub of the world capitalist system , we are awed at how much the process of constructing mediated narratives cum historical discourses is Western-dominated both organizationally and ideologically. The ubiquitous mediated communication of secondhand reality has kept alive the powerful images of joy and despair, destruction and triumph, authority , and emotion from the Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, and the Moscow coup. But as students of international communication we know surprisingly little about how the world media and journalists plan, operate, compete, and produce during these historical episodes. We know of no systematic, broad comparative account of the dynamics of international newsmaking since Wilbur Schramm (1959) published One Day in the World’s Press, an analysis of press coverage of the Suez Canal. This sustained neglect for four decades has been particularly extraordinary in view of the proliferation of journals and publications in media studies, and of the amazing growth in the number of theoretical treatises on the ideological underpinning of newswork in relation to social power and national interest. The heat of the New World Information and Communication Order debate, once highly visible and charged in the fora of international politics, threw little light on this issue. Even the current vogue in the glamour of media globalization has barely skirted around it. By good fortune, we were at the right place at the right time. In 1997 we were on the spot to witness an important chapter of history—the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong—unfolding and, further, to observe the field of action by thousands of top international journalists at close range. We saw how journalists wrote the first drafts of history from their vantage points. The result, being presented to you after long years of labor, is, we hope, a theoretically informed and empirically grounded analysis of the international newsmaking process. How did our project begin? Our institutional memory has faded: two claim the idea came from a bus ride in Montreal, the other attributes it to a challenge from a Dutch colleague, and the fourth member decides not to contest the archeological truth. What is important, however, is that we did agree to follow the admirable tradition of C. Wright Mills in trying to integrate personal interest with public issues. We were intent on taking advantage of the world media that were to congregate in one place—an alien, exotic, but most likely routinebreaking place—to cover a momentous event of global significance. We are a team of diverse backgrounds and compatible interests who actively engage one another’s minds. Lee, a native of Taiwan, on a three-year leave from the University of Minnesota to be a chair professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is interested in political and international communication , political economy of the media, and the interface between social theories and media studies. Chan, then chairing the department, was born in China but grew up in Hong Kong, with interest in international and political communication as well as the impact of information technology. Pan, arriving from his previous post at the University of Pennsylvania to join the team, is a native of China and is interested in framing analysis and political communication. So returned from Canada to his native land of Hong Kong to resume his teaching position , just in time to “catch the big show”; his interest includes media sociology and the sociology of knowledge. All educated in the United States, with prior journalistic backgrounds, we met in Hong Kong. The magnitude of this project might be unimaginable for any team less diverse or less committed than ours. In this volume, we shall try to demonstrate how nation-states fight an international discursive battle via the media to compete for legitimacy and recognition . We shall explore the causes, processes, consequences, and limits of such discursive contestation. To these goals, we strive for a “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of contestation and alliance, themes and...