Sixteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

As a city of immigrants, Hong Kong is never a stranger to refugees; instead, it has seen refugee crises three times. To date, like in other countries, refugees also survive in Hong Kong - they are isolated, excluded from the local community, and news reports. The coverage on refugees is scarce, scatted, even with certain frames in Hong Kong media. Through the use of computer-assisted content analysis, this study explores the reporting situation of refugees in local media, and also identifies the dominant frames employed in the coverage of refugee-related issues between January 2016 and January 2020 in eight local Hong Kong newspapers (N = 126). The not large sampling of news revealed that, firstly, refugee and asylum-related topics are indeed not favored by the media, and thus received rather less exposure compared to other social issues. Secondly, two dominant frames exist in the local news - either portraying refugees or asylum seekers as criminals by escaping to Hong Kong to dodge debt/criminal liability or lazy people who ventured here appealed by the social welfare or stating international NGOs’ rescue operations on Hong Kong refugees. It is difficult to see information about refugees’ personal experience, background, reasons to be here, and the Hong Kong government’s policies on this issue. Overall, these results aligning with existing documents, further confirm the predominance of stereotyped interpretations of refugee-relevant issues, and thus strengthening journalistic routines, weakening the objectivity, and impairing professional journalism.