Since the start of the television age, the Western media complex enjoyed the previously warranted status as the top provider of relevant, reliable and objective news. The UK’s BBC still tenuously retains these classic journalistic values, but somewhere along the way, something unexpected happened to the rest of the Western media complex. What were once stable providers of objective reporting started behaving more like public-relations firms for special interests and ideological factions.
In the US, deregulation saw the rampant consolidation of radio, news and print publishing companies into giant media conglomerates whose reach then became global. It happened relatively quickly over the last 20 years, but the average globally minded citizen, who by now trusts names like CNN International with a high measure of confidence, barely noticed. The subtle changes and implications this consolidation has had on diversity of opinion, the “Overton window” of acceptable public discourse or even press freedom itself, also applies to the global and local citizens of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
In 2019, it seemed that many people in Hong Kong didn’t notice the hypocrisy in the positive global reporting of our protests here, while simultaneously reporting negatively on the “yellow vests” protests of France, even though the grievances of both were supposedly based on similar ideological foundations, a call for “greater democracy”. Nor did it seem that Hong Kong people noticed the odd calls to action by high-level US government officials, like then-US senator and current vice-president Kamala Harris saying “the protests aren’t going to stop” in reference to the US’ “Black Lives Matter”-related riots during the summer of 2020, which saw at least six people killed, an estimated $2 billion in property damage, rampant looting and almost satirical characterizations of the protests like “fiery but mostly peaceful” by journalists in protective helmets and bulletproof vests standing in front of burning buildings.
The Hong Kong protests of 2019 also saw a large portion of Hong Kong people lose faith in local sources of news, which contributed further to their blind trust in Western media sources, thinking they were still the bastions of objectivity and diversity of opinion they once were, though the truth was quite the opposite.
In 1983, 90 percent of the American media landscape was controlled by an estimated 50 companies. Today, that control is global and that number is five (six if we include Japan’s Sony). Viacom, Disney, Warner Bros Discovery (which owns CNN International), Comcast and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp today control almost everything we read and watch for business or pleasure. Media consolidation started in the late ’80s but picked up speed in the mid-’90s, when then-US president Bill Clinton completed deregulation of the Federal Communications Commission by signing into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which outwardly sought to open the media landscape to smaller players, but instead did the exact opposite by allowing the big players to control more of the media market through buyouts and mergers. The rise of the internet then took the Western media consolidation phenomenon global when on Jan 10, 2000, American internet service provider America Online bought Time Warner for $162 billion.
The fact that Time Inc and Warner Communications were separate entities just 11 years prior is, today, lost on many except for the seasoned journalists, who back then tried to warn us of the inherent dangers of political bias, potentially false narratives or outright propaganda being spread under the guise of objective journalism if Western media consolidation continued unregulated. Hindsight has shown those journalists to be absolutely right. Especially on political bias shaping the news we now consume from sources some Hong Kong people still blindly trust.
Placing the people of Hong Kong in the position of being misinformed when a piece of globally relevant news, such as the widespread reporting as fact that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to win the 2016 US presidential election. Which was followed, in 2019, by the very quiet announcement from then-US Attorney General William Barr that the Justice Department investigation headed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller showed that no such collusion occurred. This danger is further compounded by Western late-night TV hosts who some Hong Kong people enjoy, but are also part of the same politically biased media conglomerates.
Luckily, those seasoned journalists have equally seasoned torchbearers to continue promotion of objectivity and ethical reporting to counter the unethical and unbalanced landscape the Western media complex has become through media consolidation. Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald are two such examples.
Bari Weiss, who was a respected op-ed staff editor and culture and politics writer for The New York Times from 2017 to 2020, resigned from her position and in her viral resignation letter said, “Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning and former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald became a household name when he helped former US National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, expose the NSA’s domestic surveillance program in 2013 from right here in Hong Kong. A year later, he would co-found The Intercept with the intention of continuing the important investigative journalism that made names like CNN International and The Guardian trusted ones. However, in 2020, he was forced to resign over censorship of an article about the dealings of Hunter Biden (son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden) with Ukraine. Greenwald’s article was deemed by his own editors as too damaging to Biden’s presidential campaign.
After two decades of media consolidation, Bari Weiss’ and Glenn Greenwald’s stories are important facts Hong Kong people need to be mindful of when consuming Western media. Hong Kong people respect logically sound arguments and objective voices. Chiefly though, most Hong Kong people not only possess the critical thinking skills to identify bias once it’s shown to them, but also the humility to change opinion based on new information. Greenwald, Weiss, along with many other seasoned journalists, some based here in Hong Kong, have chosen to retain, arguably, the most important journalistic principle: a commitment to the truth.
The author is a writer, columnist and historian based in Hong Kong.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.