Covnn Sronv voice to cameras with the club as an exotic
The Legco Balcony scene The Democratic Party on Handover night: One Politician, Four
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Still wondering what was going on, I found a space at a table in the library and asked if I could share it. The man replied that I could as long as I didn't mind being an unpaid extra in the movie The Chinese Box, a movie about a foreign correspondent in Hong Kong. It suddenly became clear to me why the people in the room were all younger, better looking and certainly better dressed than the FCC regulars - they were Hollywood's idea of what correspondents looked like.
he Handover might be seen in retrospect as a television producer's idea of what political change looked like. You might remember there was an air of unreality about Hong Kong's transition to Chinese rule.
Both Britain and China wanted an orderly Handover with unimpeded profiltaking. Yet both had been engaged in long running and virulent media campaigns
will also follow the tradition of doing three rounds in his car in the grounds of Government House to signi$r that he will return." The expected departure was timed at 4:20 p.m., and the release tells us that the music would be Auld, Lang Syne. Based on this press release, the BBC News,June 30, 1997 carried a report: "...and one last leaaing ritual for the Gouernor: his car circled the courtyard three times, a Chinese custom, which means 'hope to be back'. The gates of Goaernment House uere closed: end of era."
So you would think that the Governor's car went around three times. 'Ihe Nau York Times also wrote: "Slowly, the long blach car flying the Goaernor's ensign from the hood circled the courtyard beþre Gouernment House three times, a Chinese ritual þerþrmed by preuious goaernors to signal 'we shall return'."
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But Governor Patten did not follow the GIS script. As Time reported:
against the other; with one characterised as a corrupt tyranny and the other seen as inheriting the spoils of the
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CNN) described the relationship as being like a bad marriage with both sides slagging off the other. "They dealt with each other by fighting all the time. The extreme gestures on both
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Mike Chinoy (of
The News? This provocative question is the key element in a new book, Rnporting Hong Kong: Foreign Media and the Handouer. The text covers not only the authors' views on how the 6,000 overseas media who converged on Hong Kong in mid-1997 managed, but also how the Hong Kong government organised and controlled the occasion. The authors spoke atan FCC Professional Luncheon Professor Alan Knight, chairman of the Journalism
Dr Yoshiko Nakano, Research Assistant Professor in
Central
City University of Hong Kong's Departrnent of English:
and Media Studies Department at Queensland University:
walked into the FCC one Sunday morning in 1 997 looking f or breakf ast. There was something strange about the club that day but I couldn't put my finger on it. The FCC was crowded and there appeared to be a television journalist operating with camera and lights over near the bar. Nothing unusual in that. There were more than 6,000 foreign media expected to be in town; that is about the same number of foreign journalists as troops sent in by the People's Liberation Army. Some of the early arrivals liked to do their 10
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that we found in the Handover coverage. They are rather minor incidents, but at the same time, they illustrate the process of how misinformation evolves in the age of the Information Superhighway. First, I'll read a quote from the (Hong Kong) Government Press Release, datedJune 29,1997 "Brief on Government House departure ceremony." It was issued a day before the ceremony. It says, "Mr. Patten THE CORRESPONDENT SEPTEMBER 1999
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expected to make sense out of these violently opposed accounts of events. You might
expect that some of them became a little confused in the process.
Press conference The press awaits the latest word
The Handover was a scripted event prepared for a global television market. Many journalists were often reduced to being little more than unintentional bit players in the spectacle. The London Telegraph's Graham Hutchings said the Handover was not a spontaneous news story. "The script was written 13 years before it happened. There wasn't going to be any blood. There probably weren't going to be any unexpected developments. So in a way, you were doing a bit of theatre criticism, a review of some sort of performance rather than trying to rush around and keep pace or keep a step ahead of a moving story." This project, while an academic exercise, relied heavily on journalism methodology. Both Yoshiko and myself worked as journalists during the transit¡on, myself for RTHK and Yoshiko for NHK radio. We relied THE CORRESPONDENT SEPTEMBER 1999
"Without informing his staJf, Patten ordered the driuer to make only one-and-a-half circuits." Muyb. Governor Patten was signi4ring that he would
not be backl
edia organisations today operate under the demands for instant and constant news. Jim Laurie, then reporting for ABC News, calls it "around the clock revolving news." He said, "The trend is, sadly, to use the technology because it is there. Because you can go live, you do go live... There is very little digestion of information possible when you are going live all the time." But the impact of live television is enormous.
CNN, which was reporting the Governor's departure live, said: CNN: Nou the Goaernor's car is circling around
the
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