Journalism as part of the neoliberal urban redevelopment regime : the case of Hong Kong

Abstract

This dissertation hopes to improve journalism by addressing a neglected subject that reduces journalism to a tool of the neoliberalism urban regime. It is the blind-spot created by our taken-for-granted common-sense. This blind-spot is difficult to detect as journalism pieces are produced by the objectivity principle. As long as the news reportage follows the objectivity principle, they are rendered good journalism.

The discourse of journalism fails to recognise that journalism does not operate in vacuum and so does the objectivity principle. The discourse also fails to recognise power’s involvement in journalism.

Using the Foucaultian’s concept, discourse is intrinsically bounded up with power. Discourse also claims power, defines power, help produce and re-circulate biopower. It is under the complex web of power and biopower that journalists identify and formulate questions and story ideas, start their investigations, construct news reporting, and influence audience. The discourse also fails to recognise that journalism operates within ideology(ies). The operational logic of the ideology is already embedded in common-sense. News produced under the objectivity principle is only “objective” within that specific ideology and thus, shares its blind-spots. In the case of this dissertation, this ideology is neoliberalism.

For neoliberals, market is God. States must adopt market logics to run societies and use all sorts of means to promote and safeguard the market, resulting in privatising, outsourcing, deregulating and public-private-partnership. Although policies and methods vary between localities, the spirit is the same, promotion and creation of markets and facilitation of free and rapid flow of capital, as capital is the bloodline of the market. The market logic has already become well-accepted values and common sense. It transforms our language, practices, consciousness and discourses and changes democracies. Under the same operational logic, the conduct of governments and of corporates are fundamentally identical. News, although produced under the objectivity principle, is nonetheless, also produced from within the same neoliberal ideological common-sense, and thus, repeats, reinforces and further legitimises the market logic.

The Foucaultian’s discursive and genealogical analysis is my tool to peel off the fiddling of biopower and neoliberal governmentality in the production of knowledge, and thus the formation of discourse. The theory of discursive power in relation to the production of knowledge as a form of biopower, a form of biopolitics of control, which we are habituated into and therefore, internalise. Thus it operates through our own frame of mind and bodily practice, our feelings, perceptions, desires, assumptions, expectations, thoughts, knowledge and practices. In such a context, rather than the “Fourth Estate”, journalism unintentionally degenerated itself into a tool of the neoliberal urban regime.

In this dissertation, I analysed two neoliberal redevelopment agencies, the Lee Tung Street redevelopment project and the civil society campaign to stop the redevelopment. I also analysed the press’s reportage of the two agencies and the redevelopment project. Embedded neoliberal operational logic resulted in press reportage, though constructed “objectively”, is overly pro-market. The campaign to save Lee Tung Street, though failing to stop the bulldozer, formed a counter-hegemonic discourse that centred on people, cultural sustainability and community. The counter-hegemonic discourse changed the reportage, inspired a new preservation movement and this dissertation.