Intermedia attribute agenda-setting among Hong Kong, U.S. and Mainland Chinese media: The case of Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protests

This study integrates the Protest Paradigm into the analysis of intermedia agenda-setting and investigates the transfer of news attributes among major newspapers in Hong Kong, the U.S., and Mainland China concerning the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests, which is the largest and longest social movement in the history of Hong Kong. A total of 9,646 news headlines and headings were content analyzed. A series of Granger causality tests revealed that the direction of influence was primarily from China to the U.S., contrary to previous findings that attribute agendas flowed primarily from the U.S. to other countries. Consistent with the prediction of second-level agenda-setting effect, dominant news attributes about the protest transferred from the more “elite” U.S. media to the lower-level Hong Kong newspapers, yet results also showed a bottom-up effect with Hong Kong newspapers influencing U.S. ones in setting the news agenda regarding Chinese authority and international society.