“Don’t judge a news by its front page” –––– Reflection on the final presentation
Time files and it has come to the last week of lecture which is also time for us to consolidate what we have learnt in the past four weeks’ lectures. Our final group project focused on the investigation of the media system in Hong Kong and an in-depth analysis of the news agenda setting and framing in Hong Kong with a case study of The Standard, which one of the famous free English daily newspaper in Hong Kong. We chose the Top News of The Standard as the unit of the analysis. For the in-depth analysis of the news agenda setting and framing in The Standard, we tried to identify its news coverage, the way of news reporting regarding the use of language and the choice for photographs and the stance of the news outlet with reference to the news values being put forward in the news reports through the observation of the Top News from The Standard from June 10 to June 24.
To start with, we first carried out a preliminary study on the news coverage of The Standard in the Top News session by carrying out a statistics on the news headlines of the Top News session. We divided the news headlines into five main categories which are the local news, international news, business, China and sports. From our statistics, it is concluded that The Standard mainly covers local and international news which shows that it emphasizes on the news value of proximity, prominence and currency in their news reports. This shows that The Standard not only stresses on raising the awareness of the audience about the current local issues but also arousing their attention on the ongoing processes and latest situations of the news events that happen globally.
In addition, as we observed in the news reports, we concluded that the stance of The Standard is neutral and objective as it provides the audience with the balanced arguments from both the supporting and opposing sides of the issues. It was also observed that the the use of language is descriptive, in which contributes to the objectivity of the news that there is no use of sentimental words and most of the paragraphs of the news are written in statements and direct quoting from the interviews. The result of the project impressed me a lot as the results of the desktop research firstly showed that the political stance of The Standard inclines towards the Chinese government. In fact, The Standard does not cover much news on the Chinese government and the use of language is often neutral but not in favour of the government and officials as mentioned from the online sources. This reminds me that we should always be careful of avoiding bias in our daily lives which means not only when we are reading the newspaper, but we also need to pay attention on defining what are opinions and facts before we choose to believe in a piece of information. We should not believe in opinions until it is proven to facts with a strong evidence-based support.
The example raised by the other group showing how the Time magazine framed Trump’s immigration policy with the cover photo also illustrates the point that we should not trust the news from the media blindly before applying our critical thinking in a way that we should first understand the purpose of a news outlet to present the news in a particular way and agenda. To do so, we need to understand the background and history of a news outlet by conducting research and analysis on it. There is often a old saying that “don’t judge a book by its cover”. But from today onwards, we should also not judge a news by its front page !