In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 1 Global Event, National Prisms What the fireworks of international news illuminate or leave in the dark is the historic panorama beyond them. —Jaap van Ginneken (1998: 126) Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. —George Orwell (1954: 177) A thin massive event: a small pellet of fish food being attacked by 8,000 piranhas. —Chris Wood, a Canadian journalist, on covering the handover of Hong Kong It is often claimed that media discourse represents “a site of symbolic struggle,” but what are the processes, significance, and limits of that struggle? As a global “media event” (Dayan and Katz, 1992), the transfer of Hong Kong from British to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, 1997 provides such a site and moment for opposing national media communities to express, and thus reinforce, their enduring values and dominant ideologies. More than 8,000 journalists and 778 media organizations from around the world reportedly congregated in this bustling city to witness an event of presumed global significance.1 The political periphery of Hong Kong stands in sharp contrast to its status as a core hub of global capitalism. Yet journalists are far more interested in China than in Hong Kong. They are interested in China not so much as an ideologically benign site of geography, as it is a rising economic power, a security risk, and an ideological foe in the post-Cold War era. They participate in the embedded ideological struggle among various modern -isms: East versus West, capitalism versus socialism , democracy versus authoritarianism. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts it vividly, Hong Kong’s return to China is “not just a 1 slice of the West being given back to the East,” but also “a slice of the future being given back to the past” (December 15, 1996). What marks for China national triumph over colonialism is, in the eyes of most western journalists, “a menacing, authoritarian Chinese government, its hands still stained by the blood of Tiananmen Square, riding roughshod over freewheeling, Westernized Hong Kong” (Chinoy, 1999: 394). The world media had worried about brutal Communist China turning Hong Kong into Tiananmen II. When that scary scenario did not come to pass, their interest in Hong Kong quickly faded away after the handover.2 In view of Hong Kong’s relative stability, the world media cast all but a casual glance at the neighboring Macau (a big casino showcasing capitalist vices) when it returned from Portugal to China two years later. In the shadow of cultural and technological globalization (Braman and Sreberny -Mohammadi, 1996; Featherstone, 1995; Featherstone and Lash, 1995; Tomlinson, 1999; Waters, 1995), we wish to show in this volume that international newsmaking remains inherently ethnocentric, nationalistic, and even state-centered. Globalization may have brought the world “closer” in many ways. But global news continues to acquire paradoxically domestic, local, and above all national significance. The same event may be given distinct media representations by various nations, through the prisms of their dominant ideologies as defined by power structures, cultural repertoires, and politico-economic interests . Journalists try to illuminate complex and ambiguous political realities in remote foreign places through the process of “domestication” (Cohen et al., 1996). If international news is a state-centered enterprise, Hong Kong’s sovereignty transfer explicitly foregrounds this nation-state problematic. News is about the unexpected, the extraordinary, and the abnormal, but it can only be understood in terms of the expected, the ordinary, and the normal. As an event must be understood in relation to a whole stream of previous causes, collating selected facts into certain relationships is based on embedded cultural and national perspectives. van Ginneken (1998: 126) puts it so well: “What the fireworks of international news illuminate or leave in the dark is the historic panorama beyond them.” In general, these media frames coincide with, echo, and support elite consensus within the established order. Moreover, the state, as a repository of “national interest,” is a major contestant in international news discourse. As the media foreground the sovereignty reversion of Hong Kong as historical ruptures, lurking in the background are the ideological continuities of their nations toward China. Major western media do not recognize their quasi-consensual ideology but naturalize it as common sense. They emphasize the facts, but disguise the underlying ideology. Nevertheless, the ceding of the “capitalist jewel” to a Communist regime, against the grand narratives of “the end of history” (Fukuyama...

Share