Media in the Age of Autocratization: A Hong Kong Case Study (Thursday, March 17 2022)
Thursday, March 17, 2022
12:00-1:30 PM ET
Speaker: King-wa Fu, PhD, Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Center, the University of Hong Kong; Visiting Scholar of BU Center for the Study of Asia
Discussant: Bao Choy, Nieman Fellow at Harvard University; Investigative journalist & Video producer based in Hong Kong.
Abstract
Political scientists have identified a global wave of autocratization and media crackdown as one of the common strategies most autocrats use to seize and consolidate power. This talk will illustrate the situation faced by journalism in Hong Kong under a series of threats over the past decade, and will update the audience on the latest developments up to the introduction of the National Security Law in 2020, after which over a dozen journalists have been arrested and many news outlets have ceased operation. The talk will also present the city’s longitudinal changes in industrial and media ownership structure and the findings of content analysis to indicate the risk of decline of Hong Kong’s media diversity.
About the Speaker:
King-wa FU is a Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong. His research interests include China’s information governance, media and political participation, computational social sciences, health and the media, and younger generation’s media use. He was a visiting Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and Fulbright-RGC Hong Kong Senior Research Scholar in 2016-2017 and a China-US Scholar 2021-2022 at the Boston University. He is the Principal Investigator of Weiboscope, WeChatscope, and ANTIELAB Research Data Archive. He was a journalist at the Hong Kong Economic Journal before turning to academia. His CV can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/fukingwa/
Join us via Zoom (register for the Zoom link here or join us in person at 121 Bay State Road, Boston University (no pre-registration required)