In Hong Kong, only a few local news media organisations have their own labour unions, such as Ming Pao, Next Media, and RTHK. The respondents admitted that journalists generally did not have a say in the appointment of an editor-in-chief or the senior management team. Only one respondent suggested that newsroom journalists had replaced their editor-in-chief because of the threat of a strike, along with some other reasons. Newsrooms do not have any guidelines to ensure democratic practices. The situation became worrisome only after 1997, when Beijing began to exercise indirect control rights over Hong Kong newsrooms via allocative control, such as the appointment of staff. At present, media critics are questioning the appointment of a former head of the China news division of the well-known pro-Beijing media organisation TVB as the head of the Now TV news department, which had been recognised as the most-credible television news organisation. It has been alleged that the appointment was a political manoeuvre (Mingpao, 2020).
Regarding the framing of political issues, democratic practices in newsrooms are less common in organisations that are more inclined towards the pro-establishment camp. In the most extreme case, political news framing is rarely discussed; in other cases, permission to discuss framing depended on the political sensitivity of the news story and the political stance of the media outlets.
