Hong Kong Residents’ Perceptions of Their Local Newspapers

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Mistura Salaudeen, whose focus is on the influence of media exposure on perceptions of media credibility. Media credibility has been questioned for a long time, well before the present ’fake news’ moment – many of the citizen journalists of the 1990s and 2000s were also very critical. But what influences people’s perceptions of media credibility?

The literature suggests that the is influenced by their exposure to the media: media preferences, use frequency, political attitudes, and others may influence this. Another stream of research suggests that media use itself creates political knowledge and engagement, however; such political knowledge might itself also influence media credibility perceptions.

The present study examined this in the context of Hong Kong media. Does media exposure influence political knowledge about the public interest, information quality, and international coverage? Some 441 Hong Kong residents were surveyed over the phone to address these questions.

Nearly 61% of Hong Kong residents are regular readers of newspapers. Their focus is especially on national politics (67%) and international politics (61%), but much less on continental politics (47%) – which is shorthand for Chinese politics and the Chinese-Taiwanese relationship.

Respondents rated Hong Kong news poorly. They believe that such news outlets do not serve the interests of their readers. Newspaper readership and national political knowledge were related, but the same cannot be said for international and continental politics. Level of political knowledge was negatively related to perceptions of newspapers’ work in the public interest, or of the quality of their international coverage.

Regular newspaper readers seem to have higher knowledge of political issues than less engaged readers, therefore; this is especially pronounced for local Hong Kong issues. International news is sought mainly from international platforms, as local papers are perceived to perform poorly in this category. Political sophistication is not a factor in judgments on the quality of the information provided by the papers, though – whatever their knowledge, readers are sceptical about the information they receive.