1 Media literacy and education in Hong Kong: Whose media? Whose literacy?

This paper looks at the state of journalism education in Hong Kong, a city with a very diverse media and consequently no consensus agreement on any one of the conventional theories of the press. The territory has very high rates of newspaper readership by international standards and supports an unusually large number of newspapers for a city of its size. Also it has examples of newspapers that pursue each of the traditional models, from the authoritarian to the libertarian. “Left-wing ” papers which are willing propaganda organs of the Chinese government coexist with racy tabloids and heavyweight “newspapers of record”. This diversity in orientation is reflected in the great variation in the theoretical substructure of the journalism courses taught in Hong Kong universities and the wide range of backgrounds found in those who teach them, though this has more to do with the training culture from which the universities take their inspiration than the media marketplace itself. The paper notes that the increasing commercialisation of Hong Kong higher education has made Journalism a popular offering at several levels, without the appearance of any single idea about the role o