Deliberation about the 2014 Umbrella Movement in a Hong Kong elite newspaper: A quantitative study of the Hong Kong Economic Journal

Abstract

Deliberative democratic theorists have argued that effective deliberation is central to democracy. Does Hong Kong possess a viable public sphere for deliberating important public issues, as the city has been striving for a full democracy since the 1980s? This article addresses this significant question by examining the quality of deliberation on the 2014 Umbrella Movement by the editorials and commentaries in an elite print Chinese newspaper – the Hong Kong Economic Journal – based on the “Discourse Quality Index” and other criteria used by major works on mediated deliberation. This article argues that the Journal has served as a viable public sphere for deliberating important public concerns in Hong Kong. The Journal’s editorials and commentaries performed well in terms of offering reasoned arguments and engaging in dialogue with opposing viewpoints. Regarding respect for the actors which were involved in the Umbrella Movement, the Journal as a whole had maintained a civilized tone. However, there was an indication that commentary authors had less tolerance toward actors from the opposite camps.

Keywords

democracy in Hong Kong mediated deliberation political conversation quality of deliberation Umbrella Movement

This makes me terribly sad, the fact that we can sit around and debate issues on any number of countries, each with messes equal to or bigger than our own, but when it comes to our home [Hong Kong], increasingly, we cannot have a debate about Hong Kong in Hong Kong…Such a debate if it can be had intelligently, would be extremely beneficial to Hong Kong. After all, such is the virtue of a true democracy – the ability to hash out ideas and let the strongest ones triumph through gentle persuasion, not by bashing them into people’s heads. (Yang, 2016)

We need rational discussion to achieve mutual understanding and settle differences. Unfortunately, this is now rare in our society. (Chan, 2014)¹

The foregoing comments suggest that Hong Kong is suffering from a lack of rational deliberation on public affairs. To what extent are these comments valid? Rational deliberation on public affairs is important to Hong Kong as the city has been striving for a full democracy since the 1980s. As argued by Dryzek (2009), effective deliberation is central to democracy. This is because democratic legitimacy depends on the right, ability, and opportunity of those subject to a collective decision to deliberate about the content of that decision.

Does Hong Kong possess a viable public sphere for deliberating important public issues? This article provides the first step to answer this significant question by examining whether the print newspapers with elite orientation have served as a public sphere for deliberation on important public issues. We assessed the quality of deliberation on the 2014 Umbrella Movement by the editorials and commentaries in an elite print Chinese newspaper – the Hong Kong Economic Journal – based on the “Discourse Quality Index” developed by Steiner et al. (2004) and other criteria used by major works on mediated deliberation. This article argues that the Hong Kong Economic Journal has served as a viable public sphere for deliberating important public concerns in Hong Kong.

This article is organized as follows. First, it reviews the literature on public deliberation, the public sphere and mediated deliberation, and Hong Kong’s media politics. It also discusses why we chose to study mediated deliberation. Second, it elaborates the methodology and data of this research, paying special attention to the “Discourse Quality Index”. The third section examines the important findings of our analysis of deliberation on the Umbrella Movement by the editorials and commentaries in the Hong Kong Economic Journal. The final section concludes and suggests a few potential directions for future research.

Literature review of public deliberation, public sphere, and mediated deliberation

Public deliberation, defined as “when people carefully study a problem and reach a well-reasoned solution after a period of inclusive and respectful consideration of diverse viewpoints” (Gastil and Black, 2008: 2), has long been recognized as crucial to the effective functioning of democratic government. In their study of public deliberation in America, Jacobs, Cook, and Carpini (2009) highlight that citizen discourse and deliberation constitutes a tangible and necessary feature of a healthy democratic citizenry. Page (1996) also contends that if the public wants to actively monitor and control the government, they must be well-informed. One important way to make the public well-informed is effective public deliberation.

Public deliberation takes place in the public sphere, which refers to the forums of communication within a society in which citizens discuss issues of common concern before an imagined audience (Habermas, 1989). The public sphere consists of various forums, including mass media, parliaments, courts, the street, and Internet chat rooms. This study investigates mediated deliberation, specifically deliberation in the print newspapers, because the newspapers have performed a crucial role in public deliberation. Page (1996) has contended that public deliberation in modern societies is highly mediated. Professional communicators (e.g. journalists and commentators) are responsible for deliberating major public issues through their contributions to media outlets. Key messages and ideas may emerge from the reportage and commentaries provided by these professional communicators and spread to the public. The public may then take cues and information from these professional communicators when they discuss the issues with each other. Chambers and Costain (2000) likewise contend that the media play a central role in democratic deliberation. In modern societies, face-to-face communication only constitutes a small part of the process of democratic deliberation. Instead, public deliberation is mostly mediated deliberation. Drale (2004) argues that the media serve as important channels of reasoned democratic conversation in the public sphere. Ettema’s (2007) research on the news media’s missions also maintains that promotion of vigorous public debate on important public issues is a central task of the press. Finally, Mansbridge, Bohman J, Chambers S, et al. (2012) highlight that the media facilitate the functioning of the deliberative system as they connect its different parts.

A growing body of works on mediated deliberation on controversial public issues has been produced in the past decade. Cook et al. (2006) investigate the recurrent themes, wording, and content of the 2003 genetically-modified (GM) food debate in the British newspapers. Augoustinos et al. (2010) examine how the major stakeholders in the GM food debate in the UK were represented and positioned in six UK newspapers in 2004 and how these stakeholder identities were mobilized. The results show that the GM food debate was represented in the press as a battleground of competing interests. Based on the case study of a government plan to relocate the administrative capital in South Korea in the 2000s, Kim, Scheufele, Shanahan, et al. (2011) analyze the role of news media (including newspapers) in facilitating informed issue evaluation by citizens (i.e. citizens’ ability to carefully evaluate different attributes of an issue). Data from a telephone survey of residents in Seoul demonstrate that citizens who often used news media were more able to articulate reasons why relocation would be a good or a bad proposal. While providing us with useful insights such as the impact of newspapers’ stances on their representations of the issues in debate and the effect of the frequency of newspaper reading on citizens’ capacity to evaluate public issues, the foregoing studies have not analyzed the quality of deliberation in the newspapers. This gap in the literature has recently caught scholarly attention. Pomatto and Seddone (2017) compare the degree of deliberative quality of 15 print newspapers in Italy, France, and Spain in 2012. The study employs a range of indicators to assess the newspapers’ deliberative quality, such as the diversity of covered political topics, the presence of opposing speakers, civility in the language, and the use of justifications for one’s positions. The results demonstrate that French newspapers achieved a higher degree of deliberative quality. Moreover, the degree of the deliberative quality of newspapers was closely related to the national journalistic culture. Pomatto and Seddone (2017) lend important insights to our study of Hong Kong, especially the indicators to measure the deliberative quality of the press.

Existing studies on the Hong Kong press focus on how the Chinese government seeks to control the press and the strategies adopted by the press in response to the pressure from Beijing. Chan and Lee (1989, 1991) discuss how political transition triggered by the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration prompted the editorial paradigm shifts among Hong Kong’s major newspapers and the interaction between Xinhua News Agency (Beijing’s command post in Hong Kong) and the Hong Kong press in the 1980s. For the post-1997 period, Ma (2007) and Lee (2015) examine the dynamics of Beijing’s effort to restrain Hong Kong’s press and how journalists and society resisted. While offering us insightful analysis of the politics of the state–press relationship in Hong Kong, the foregoing studies have not discussed the extent to which Hong Kong’s press has facilitated public deliberation on controversial issues when the city encounters dramatic political changes. Our study of Hong Kong plugs this gap by examining whether an elite print Chinese newspaper can provide a public sphere for deliberation.

In order to evaluate the quality of mediated deliberation in Hong Kong, we investigated how the editorials and commentaries of an elite print Chinese newspaper – the Hong Kong Economic Journal – deliberated on the 2014 Umbrella Movement, a significant political event in post-colonial Hong Kong. We chose to study the Hong Kong Economic Journal (the Journal hereafter) because the newspaper has positioned itself as a newspaper which provides quality and diverse commentaries and analyses on the economy, finance, and public affairs ( Hong Kong Economic Journal, n.d.). We would like to know whether this elite newspaper has served as a viable public sphere where the public in Hong Kong can deliberate on matters of common concern. Major studies on mediated deliberation in the United States and Germany have also focused on elite newspapers like the New York Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Bennett et al., 2004; Ferree et al., 2002; Page, 1996). This study has its limitations. It only focuses on an elite newspaper, and therefore the findings cannot be generalized to other newspapers in Hong Kong. The concluding section will discuss how our future endeavors address this limitation.

That said, we argue that the editorials and commentaries of the Journal can promote public debate on the Umbrella Movement and more broadly other important socio-political issues. The Journal had a circulation of more than 62,000 in 2018 (Marketing Magazine, 2018). Some of the Journal’s commentaries had aroused widespread public deliberation. Benny Tai, a co-founder of the Umbrella Movement, first presented his idea of the Occupy Central Movement (which finally evolved into the Umbrella Movement) in his commentary in the Journal on 16 January 2013 (Tai, 2013c). This commentary together with the later ones published in the Journal sparked extensive public deliberation on the Movement and the idea of civil disobedience and the rule of law in Hong Kong (Tai, 2013a, 2013b, 2013d). After the end of the Umbrella Movement, Joseph Lian, a long-time columnist for the Journal, wrote a series of commentaries discussing the prospect of Hong Kong’s independence and self-autonomy. Lian’s commentaries aroused extensive public deliberation on the political future of Hong Kong.²

We study the 2014 Umbrella Movement for two reasons. First, the Umbrella Movement is one of the most contentious socio-political issues in post-colonial Hong Kong. We would like to investigate whether the print media, specifically the Journal, can provide a viable public sphere to deliberate on this contentious issue. Second, more editorials and commentaries on the Umbrella Movement were written during the relatively long period of duration of the Movement. This, in turn, provides researchers with enough editorials and commentaries to conduct a detailed content analysis.

Methodology and data

The Umbrella Movement started on 28 September 2014 and ended on 15 December 2014 when the Hong Kong police cleared the last occupied area in Causeway Bay. The period of our study lasted from 29 September to 15 December 2014.

We purchased the Journal during the period of our study and scanned all the editorial pages and the Opinion sections. Then we read all the editorials and commentaries and selected for further analysis those which focused on the Movement. An editorial or a commentary would be selected only if more than half of its utterances (complete sentences) focused on the Umbrella Movement. In total, 41 editorials and 230 commentaries centered on the Movement and they were included in this study.

To assess the quality of mediated deliberation on the Umbrella Movement, we drew on the “Discourse Quality Index” and the criteria used by major works on mediated deliberation. Developed by Steiner et al. (2004) to investigate the quality of parliamentary deliberation in Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the Discourse Quality Index (DQI) is primarily based on Habermas’ theory of deliberation (Habermas, 1989, 1996). This study focused on two major components of the DQI, namely respect and justification for one’s position.

Respect

Respect is the first criterion for evaluating the quality of deliberation. This criterion can be further divided into: “respect for the opposing arguments” and “respect for the social groups which are involved in the issue under discussion”. Respect for the opposing arguments during mediated deliberation means whether an editorial or a commentary has appreciated (respect), mocked or insulted (disrespect), or adopted a neutral stance (neither respect nor disrespect) toward opposing arguments. The more disrespectful language an editorial or a commentary has used in its discussion of the opposing arguments, the lower the level of its deliberative quality, and vice versa.

An example of disrespecting opposing arguments is provided here. In his commentary published on 28 October 2014, Wong On-yin disagreed with the argument which urged student protestors to withdraw from the occupied sites and to return home. In his rebuttal to this argument, Wong wrote:

Today’s struggle for democracy has not made any progress. The dictator not only failed to order Leung Chun-ying to step down but also refused to apologize to the public. For those people who urged student protestors to withdraw and return home, I ask you to use a little bit of common sense to persuade others to accept your viewpoints! Please use clear reasons, not bullshit [emphasis added] like your parents and teachers are worried about you. (OY Wong, 2014)

Given that Wong described the opposing argument as bullshit, we coded his response as “disrespect”. An example of adopting a neutral stance toward opposing arguments is discussed here. In his commentary, Richard YC Wong disagreed with the description of the Umbrella Movement by foreign media as the Umbrella Revolution. He responded to the opposing argument in the following passage:

Foreign media is completely wrong in describing the protests led by the youth in Hong Kong as the Umbrella Revolution. These young protestors do not seek to overthrow the government. Instead, they just want to pursue greater democracy in a liberal society. How can we describe the protests as revolutionary acts? These are only moral protests led by idealists and students nurtured under an open and diverse society…The analogy of revolution is inappropriate. (RYC Wong, 2014)

Given that Wong had used neither respectful nor disrespectful language in his response to the opposing argument, we coded his response as “neutral”.

Quality deliberation also requires respect for the actors involved in the issue under discussion. In the case of the Umbrella Movement, we broadly divided the actors into two groups: pro-Movement and anti-Movement. The former included: the co-founders of the Movement, the Hong Kong Federation of Students, Scholarism, pro-democracy political parties, protestors in the occupied sites, and the like. The latter included: Beijing, the Hong Kong government, Leung Chun-ying, the Hong Kong police, pro-establishment political parties, and the anti-Movement groups. We investigated whether an editorial or a commentary had used any respectful or disrespectful language when it mentioned the pro-Movement and anti-Movement groups. An example of respecting the pro-Movement groups is illustrated in Lam Hang-chi’s commentary published on 15 October 2014, in which he showed appreciation of the student participants of the Movement:

The author deeply admires the student participants of the Occupy Movement not only because of their courage but also their sharp mind and upright and humble character. They protested against the restrictions on the political reform which have deprived their rights to choose their destiny. (Lam, 2014)

An example of disrespecting the anti-Movement actors is shown in Lai Chak-fun’s commentary in which he used name-calling, e.g. labelling Leung Chun-ying ‘689’.³ Lai wrote:

This showed that it was “689” who ordered the use of physical forces to disperse the protestors. If “689”, who embraces adventurism, continues his hardline approach, the bloody military suppression during the June 4 Incident will appear in Hong Kong…(Lai, 2014)

Justification for one’s position

Reasoned discourse—giving justification to support one’s argument—is a central component of Habermas’s theory of deliberation (Calhoun, 1992; Habermas, 1989). Political communication scholarship also maintains that the press should serve as a committed reason-giver (Ettema, 2007). Steiner et al. (2004) devised four levels of justification to judge to what extent a legislator has provided justifications for their positions. To assess how well an editorial or a commentary provided reasons to justify its positions, our study adopted the scheme developed by Steiner et al. The first level is “no justification”, which means no reason is given. An example can be found in the commentary written by Wong Pak-nung on 24 October 2014. Wong made the following argument:

In their support for the 1989 Democratic Movement in China, Hong Kong people displayed an altruistic and patriotic spirit. They sought to save the country by democracy. However, the author thinks that the participants in the current Occupy Movement use democracy to serve themselves. They seem to focus on their own interests, in that they only want to bring the development of Hong Kong to a direction which will only benefit themselves. (PN Wong, 2014)

Wong, however, did not provide any reason to justify this argument. Thus, we coded his level of justification as “no justification”. The second level of justification is “inferior justification”, which means that a reason is given to support a position but no or little linkage is made between the reason and the position. For example, in his commentary published on 29 October 2014, Lee Yuet argued that the protestors should withdraw from the occupied sites of Admiralty, Causeway Bay, and Mongkok and move to Tamar Park. The reason given by Lee was that the move could respond to Xi Jiping’s call to make a Chinese Hong Kong dream (Lee, 2014). However, Lee failed to elaborate how the withdrawal from the occupied sites was related to Xi’s call to make a Chinese Hong Kong dream. Thus, we coded Lee’s justification as “inferior justification”.

The third level of justification is “qualified justification”, which means that a reason is given to justify a position and the linkage between the reason and the position is complete. In his commentary, for instance, Ricky Wong argued that the young participants in the Movement are not simple-minded and vulnerable to incitement by other parties. Wong justified his argument with the following reason:

As shown in the numerous Facebook articles and media interviews, the majority of the young participants in the Movement have provided articulate responses to the questions concerning why they joined the Movement. Compared to many adults, these young participants know clearly what they are pursuing. The main slogans of the Movement are neither “independence of Hong Kong” nor “we are not Chinese”. Instead, these young people only demanded the central government to implement genuine universal suffrage in Hong Kong. (R Wong, 2014)

Given that Wong used a complete justification, namely the articulate responses by the young participants in the mass media and the contents of the Movement slogans, to justify his position that the young participants are not simple-minded, we coded Wong’s justification as “qualified justification”.

The highest level of justification is “sophisticated justification”, which means that two or more reasons are given to justify a position and the linkage between the reasons and the position is complete. Wong Chack-kie’s commentary, for example, offered two complete justifications to support his argument that it is very dangerous for the protesters to occupy Mongkok (CK Wong, 2014). First, Mongkok is a place where the grassroots and less educated are living and working. Their way of expressing dissatisfaction is blunt and thereby more easily causes conflict. Their livelihood has been undermined by the ideal-seeking protesters. Second, Mongkok’s triad members have operated extensive illegal activities there, including gambling, prostitution, and drug trafficking. Protesters’ occupation of Mongkok will prompt more police to patrol the area, which in turn will affect the nearby illegal activities run by the triad. Accordingly, protesters’ long-term occupation of Mongkok is very likely to provoke violent responses from the grassroots and triad members.

Apart from “respect” and “justification for one’s position”, we also investigated the quality of mediated deliberation on the Movement from the perspective of “engagement in dialogue with opposing viewpoints”.

Dialogue with opposing viewpoints

As highlighted by Bennett et al. (2004) and Maia (2009), the willingness of an author to engage in dialogue with the opposing viewpoints is an important criterion to evaluate the quality of deliberation in the print newspapers. As Ferree et al. (2002) argue, “A conversation presumes an encounter, and encounter presumes the possibility of openness to the others’ ideas”. We coded whether an editorial or a commentary had mentioned and refuted any viewpoints with which it disagreed.⁴ We first calculated the percentage of editorials and commentaries which had engaged in dialogue with the opposing viewpoints. Then we followed Ferree et al. and used two indicators to assess their degree of dialogue with the opposing viewpoints, namely: 1) the percentage of utterances in an editorial or commentary that were spent on rebutting opposing viewpoints; 2) the average number of opposing viewpoints that an editorial or a commentary rebutted.

One coder completed all the coding. Twenty per cent of the data were randomly chosen for coding by the second coder. Inter-coder reliability is reported in Table 1. Having elaborated the methods and data of this study, the following section will present the major findings.

Table 1.

Inter-coder reliability.

	Inter-coder reliability
	Inter-coder agreement	Cohen’s kappa	p value
Respectful/disrespectful/neutral utterances toward pro-Movement actors	90.74%	0.90	<0.001
Respectful/disrespectful/neutral utterances toward anti-Movement actors	90.74%	0.90	<0.001
Dialogue with opposing viewpoints	90.74%	0.82	<0.001
Number of utterances on rebuttal	88.89%	0.84	<0.001
Number of arguments that editorial/commentary rebutted	88.89%	0.82	<0.001
Respectful/disrespectful/neutral utterances toward opposing arguments	87.04%	0.84	<0.001
Number of positions	94.44%	0.84	<0.001
Level of justification for position	90.74%	0.86	<0.001
Stance toward Umbrella Movement	94.44%	0.90	<0.001

Findings

We first report the coverage of the Umbrella Movement by the Journal’s editorials and commentaries. During our period of study, the Journal in total published 66 editorials and 497 commentaries. Forty-one (62 per cent) of these editorials and 230 (46 per cent) of the commentaries focused on the Movement. Although we do not have the corresponding figures for other major newspapers in Hong Kong, we consider that the Journal provided the public with substantial access to the debate about the Movement given that more than half of its editorials and close to half of its commentaries focused on the Movement.

Several important findings concerning the authorship of the editorials and commentaries on the Movement are highlighted here. First, all the Journal’s editorials were unsigned. Second, the 230 commentaries were penned by 70 authors who came from diverse backgrounds. Sixteen of them (the largest group) were academics teaching at the universities in Hong Kong. Others included legislators, representatives of non-governmental organizations, secondary school principals, lawyers, social workers, businesspeople, and public affairs commentators. Third, the vast majority of the commentary’s authors were male. After excluding the two co-authored commentaries and the nine authors who used pseudonyms, only one commentary author (out of 57) was female.⁵ Since there was only one female commentary author, we could not use “gender” as an independent variable in our analysis.

Respect: A sphere for civilized deliberation provided by the Journal

We now discuss the findings regarding the quality of deliberation on the Movement by the Journal’s editorials and commentaries. In terms of respect for the opposing arguments, the Journal generally maintained a sphere for civilized deliberation. Nineteen editorials discussed the opposing arguments and none of them used respectful or disrespectful language in their discussion. These editorials only used neutral language (neither respectful nor disrespectful) in their deliberation with the opposing arguments. The level of disrespect is somewhat higher for commentaries. One hundred and thirty-nine commentaries had discussed the opposing arguments. While none of them had used respectful language, 15 (11 per cent) had employed disrespectful language. In total, these 15 commentaries had 22 disrespectful utterances and on average each contained 1.47 disrespectful utterances. To investigate whether a commentary’s stance toward the Umbrella Movement affected its likelihood of disrespecting opposing arguments, we conducted a one-way ANOVA to compare the number of disrespectful utterances against the opposing arguments among commentaries which supported, opposed, as well as neither supported nor opposed the Movement. Results showed that there was no significant difference in the number of disrespectful utterances against the opposing arguments among the three types of commentaries, F(2,136) = 0.541, p = 0.584, indicating that commentaries with different stances toward the Movement displayed similar levels of disrespect toward opposing arguments.

Regarding respect for the actors which are involved in the issue under discussion, our analysis indicated that the Journal generally maintained a sphere for civilized deliberation as well, though there were some important differences between the pro-Movement and anti-Movement actors. Ten per cent and 2 per cent of the editorials employed respectful language toward the pro-Movement and anti-Movement actors respectively. None of the editorials contained disrespectful language toward either the pro-Movement or anti-Movement actors.

The commentaries expressed different levels of respect and disrespect toward the pro-Movement and anti-Movement actors. Fifteen per cent of the commentaries employed respectful language toward the pro-Movement actors, whereas the corresponding figure for anti-Movement actors was merely 4 per cent. Concerning disrespectful utterances, we saw the reverse. Four per cent of the commentaries used disrespectful language against the pro-Movement actors but the corresponding figure for anti-Movement actors reached 11 per cent. To examine whether the commentaries as a whole were more likely to 1) respect the pro-Movement actors than anti-Movement actors and 2) disrespect the anti-Movement actors than pro-Movement actors, we conducted a series of chi-square tests. The results showed a positive answer, χ²(1) = 19.355, p < 0.001. The Journal’s commentaries as a whole were more likely to respect the pro-Movement actors and disrespect the anti-Movement actors.

Stances toward the movement mattered for respect/disrespect of the movement actors

Given the aforementioned finding, we conducted further analyses to explore under what circumstances a commentary would be more likely to respect/disrespect the pro-Movement and anti-Movement actors. Our statistical analyses demonstrated that a commentary’s stance toward the Movement was an important factor. Two sets of one-way ANOVA were conducted to compare the numbers of respectful and disrespectful utterances toward the pro-Movement actors among commentaries which 1) supported, 2) opposed, and 3) neither supported nor opposed the Movement. The results showed that there was a significant difference in the number of respectful utterances toward the pro-Movement actors among the three types of commentaries, F(2,224) = 7.945, p < 0.001. Tukey post hoc tests revealed that the number of respectful utterances toward the pro-Movement actors in the commentaries which supported the Movement was significantly greater than that in the commentaries which opposed the Movement (p = 0.002), and in the commentaries which neither supported nor opposed the Movement (p = 0.009). The number of respectful utterances toward the pro-Movement actors was comparable between the commentaries which opposed the Movement and those which neither supported nor opposed the Movement (p = 0.970). These results illustrated that commentaries which supported the Movement contained significantly more respectful utterances toward the pro-Movement actors than the other two types of commentaries.

Concerning the number of disrespectful utterances toward the pro-Movement actors, there was a significant difference between the three types of commentaries, F(2,224) = 3.971, p = 0.020. Tukey post hoc tests revealed that the number of disrespectful utterances toward the pro-Movement actors in commentaries which opposed the Movement was significantly greater than that in commentaries which supported the Movement (p = 0.034). The number of disrespectful utterances toward the pro-Movement actors was comparable between the commentaries which neither supported nor opposed the Movement and those which supported the Movement (p = 0.861) as well as those which opposed the Movement (p = 0.053). These results indicated that commentaries which opposed the Movement showed significantly more disrespectful utterances toward the pro-Movement actors than those which supported the Movement.

Two sets of one-way ANOVA were conducted to compare the number of respectful and disrespectful utterances toward the anti-Movement actors among the three types of commentaries. The results showed that there was no significant difference in the number of respectful utterances toward the anti-Movement actors among the three types of commentaries, F(2,220) = 1.232, p = 0.294. However, regarding the number of disrespectful utterances toward the anti-Movement actors, there was significant difference among the three types of commentaries, F(2,220) = 6.673, p = 0.002. Tukey post hoc tests demonstrated that the number of disrespectful utterances toward the anti-Movement actors in the commentaries which supported the Movement was significantly greater than that in the commentaries which opposed the Movement (p = 0.002). The number of disrespectful utterances toward the anti-Movement actors was comparable between the commentaries which neither supported nor opposed the Movement and those which supported the Movement (p = 0.094) as well as those which opposed the Movement (p = 0.792).

Summing up, a commentary’s stance toward the Movement significantly affected its likelihood of respecting/disrespecting the pro-Movement and anti-Movement actors.

The Journal as a forum for reasoned deliberation

The Journal provided a space for reasoned deliberation on the Movement, as the vast majority of its editorials and commentaries offered a high level of justification to sustain their positions. The 41 editorials raised 53 positions and the 230 commentaries 302 positions. The editorials gave strong justifications for their positions. None of them offered no justification or inferior justification. Instead, 47 per cent of their positions were supported by qualified justification and 53 per cent by sophisticated justification. Regarding commentaries, 3 per cent of their positions did not have any justification and 2 per cent had inferior justification. Forty-six per cent and 49 per cent of the positions were sustained by qualified and sophisticated justifications respectively.

We conducted statistical analyses to examine whether an editorial or commentary’s balance of viewpoints toward the Movement had affected its overall and average level of justification of its position.⁶ For editorials, two sets of one-way ANOVA were conducted to investigate the overall and average level of justification among four types of editorials: 1) those only including supporting viewpoints; 2) those only including opposing viewpoints; 3) those including both supporting and opposing viewpoints; 4) those including neither supporting nor opposing viewpoints. The results showed that there was no significant difference in the overall level of justification, F(3,37) = 0.964, p = 0.420 and the average level of justification among the four types of editorials, F(3,37) = 0.468, p = 0.706.

For commentaries, we conducted the same type of analysis as well. The results showed that there was significant difference in the overall level of justification among the four types of commentaries, F(3,226) = 5.076, p = 0.002. Tukey post hoc tests revealed that the overall level of justification in commentaries that included both supporting and opposing viewpoints was significantly higher than those which only included opposing viewpoints (p = 0.001). However, the significant result found in the overall level of justification might be due to the fact that there was significant difference in the number of positions among the four types of commentaries, F(3,226) = 2.976, p = 0.032. The number of positions in the commentaries which included both supporting and opposing viewpoints was significantly greater than those which only included opposing viewpoints (p = 0.036).

After controlling for the effect of the number of positions, another set of ANOVA for the average level of justification was conducted. The results demonstrated that there was no significant difference in the average level of justification among the four types of commentaries, F(3,226) = 2.005, p = 0.114, indicating that the four types of commentaries possessed similar levels of justification of their positions.

We also explored whether an editorial or commentary’s stance toward the Movement had affected its overall and average level of justification of its position. Two sets of one-way ANOVA were conducted. The results showed that there was no significant difference in the overall level of justification among the three types of editorials (supported, opposed, neither supported nor opposed the Movement), F(2,38) = 0.043, p = 0.958. Moreover, there was no significant difference in the average level of justification among the three types of editorials, F(2,38) = 0.524, p = 0.596. Similar results were also found for the commentaries. There was no significant difference in the overall level of justification among the three types of commentaries (supported, opposed, neither supported nor opposed the Movement), F(2,227) = 2.296, p = 0.103, and the average level of justification, F(2,227) = 1.215, p = 0.299.

Responsive to opposing viewpoints

Compared to the editorials, the commentaries were more active in engaging in dialogue with the opposing viewpoints. Among the 41 editorials, 19 (46 per cent) of them had engaged in dialogue with the opposing viewpoints. Concerning the 230 commentaries, 139 (60 per cent) of them had engaged in dialogue with the opposing viewpoints. The commentaries had also devoted a slightly higher proportion of the utterances to rebutting the opposing viewpoints than the editorials. The former on average spent 20 per cent of their utterances and the latter 18 per cent. For those editorials and commentaries which had engaged in conversation with opposing viewpoints, on average they had engaged with almost the same number of opposing viewpoints (1.47 for editorials and 1.53 for commentaries). As its editorials and in particular its commentaries were willing to dialogue with the opposite viewpoints, the Journal had exposed the public to diverse perspectives on the Movement.

We finally conducted statistical analyses to examine whether there were significant differences in the number and proportion of utterances spent on rebutting opposing viewpoints among editorials and commentaries with different stances toward the Movement. Since there was no editorial supporting the Movement, two independent t-tests were performed to compare the number and proportion of utterances spent on rebutting opposing viewpoints between editorials that opposed the Movement and those that neither supported nor opposed. The results revealed that both the number and proportion of utterances devoted to rebuttal in editorials that opposed the Movement were greater than those in the editorials which neither supported nor opposed the Movement, t(17) = 1.407, p = 0.177; t(17) = 1.535, p = 0.143. Regarding commentaries, the results of one-way ANOVA showed that there were no significant differences in the number and proportion of utterances spent on rebutting opposing viewpoints among commentaries with different stances toward the Movement, F(2,136) = 0.159, p = 0.853; F(2,136) = 1.574, p = 0.211.

Discussion and conclusion

This is the first systematic research on the quality of deliberation in the print newspaper in Hong Kong. Our study of the Umbrella Movement showed that the Journal overall had offered a viable public sphere for deliberating public issues. As argued by Gutmann and Thompson (2004), reason-giving is the central element of healthy deliberation, which in turn is crucial to any democratic system. The Journal’s editorials and commentaries performed well in terms of offering reasoned arguments. All the editorials and the majority of commentaries either provided qualified or sophisticated justifications to sustain their positions. In other words, the Journal’s opinion pieces had largely fulfilled a fundamental mandate of journalism: to give reasons to persuade others to accept its perspectives (Ettema, 2007).

The Journal’s editorials and commentaries were willing to respond and deliberate with opposing viewpoints. Forty-six per cent of the editorials and 60 per cent of the commentaries had spent about one-fifth of their passages on deliberating with the opposite viewpoints. Our analyses also found that the majority of these dialogues with opposite viewpoints were conducted in a civilized manner, as only 11 per cent of the commentaries used disrespectful language in these dialogues.

Regarding respect for the actors involved in the Umbrella Movement, the Journal as a whole maintained a civilized tone given that only 4 per cent and 11 per cent of its commentaries had employed disrespectful language against the pro-Movement and the anti-Movement actors respectively. However, there was an indication that commentary authors had less tolerance toward actors from the opposite camps. Our statistical analyses showed that commentaries which opposed the Movement used significantly more disrespectful utterances towards the pro-Movement actors than commentaries which supported the Movement. Commentaries which supported the Movement used significantly more disrespectful utterances toward the anti-Movement actors than commentaries which opposed the Movement. This is perhaps a less satisfactory finding concerning the quality of deliberation on the Umbrella Movement by the Journal.

Our study of the Journal’s deliberation on the Umbrella Movement showed that the Journal in general has provided a viable public sphere for deliberation on public concerns in Hong Kong – a city which has been pursuing democracy since the 1980s. The results may reflect the fact that the Journal has long targeted the elites including the intelligentsia, the business community, and the government as its major readers. Additionally, it has a tradition of serving as a platform which emphasizes the expression of diverse opinions and reasoning. As mentioned by the Journal’s former editor-in-chief Lam Hang-chi, “Under my editorship, the Journal sought to develop into a platform which embraces wide-ranging viewpoints. Enabling commentators with diverse viewpoints to discuss public affairs based on reasoning is a valuable function of the mass media” (Lam, 2015).

Historian Martin Jay (2017) has claimed that reason and deliberation can thrive only if institutions and practices are nurtured. As an important institution for public deliberation, the mass media has to be nurtured as well. This article presents the results of the first systematic research on mediated deliberation in Hong Kong. Two directions for future research are suggested. First, given that our study only focused on an elite newspaper, the results may not be generalizable to other newspapers in Hong Kong. Researchers can examine deliberation by other types of newspapers like the two mass-oriented newspapers Apple Daily and Oriental Daily. The former adopts a pro-democracy stance and the latter a pro-government stance. Additionally, middle-class oriented newspapers such as Ming Pao and Sing Tao Daily can be included in the analysis. To what extent can these mass-oriented and middle-class newspapers provide a viable forum for public deliberation? How does deliberation by mass-oriented newspapers differ from that by elite and middle-class oriented newspapers? By including the mass-oriented and middle-class newspapers in future endeavors, it is hoped that the data can meet the assumption that the mass media provide the public with substantial access to the debates on major social issues and encourage rational and quality debates. Second, researchers can explore the socio-political impacts of mediated deliberation. For example, will the quality of mediated deliberation affect public evaluation of the political system and citizens’ political learning? The aforementioned are important and under-studied questions that deserve serious attention from researchers.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by a Direct Grant from Faculty of Social Sciences, Lingnan University. Grant number DR17B3.

ORCID iD

Waikeung Tam

Notes

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