NEWSPAPER COVERAGE AND PUBLIC-OPINION IN HONG-KONG - A TIME-SERIES ANALYSIS OF MEDIA PRIMING

Based on the psychological model of media priming, we examine the pote ntially strong link between news content and public opinion about Gove rnor Fatten's democratization plan for Hong Kong. Similar to previous priming studies, we hypothesized that an ii?crease in the amount of me dia coverage of Fatten's political reform plan would cause the public to assign more weight to the issue when evaluating the governor's over all performance. To validate the priming hypothesis in a nonexperiment al setting, this study uses time-series data obtained from 52 weekly p ublic opinion polls, coupled with content analysis of three leading ne wspapers in Hong Kong between October 1992 and October 1993. The findi ngs provide strong evidence supporting the media priming theory on an aggregate data level. Newspaper coverage of Fatten's reform plan great ly inflated the relative importance of his proposal in the public's ev aluation of his overall performance, with a I-week delay. The priming hypothesis survived a stringent test of several rival factors, includi ng autocorrelation, the influence of the economy, and other important real-world events.