Mass Media’s Role in Stimulating Interest in Solar Energy Uptake: Examination of Feed-in Tariff News Coverage in Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s solar energy adoption lags behind its global peers, although the findings of numerous studies show that the city can take up the power on a bigger scale. This manuscript contributes to the research stream by investigating the role that mass media could play in engaging citizens on more healthy debates of solar energy and the Feed-in Tariff (FiT) scheme, in which households and institutions are paid for the energy they generate and is the government’s first initiative on renewable energy involving the members of the public. Applying the theories of media framing, media hegemony, and public sphere, I conducted a content analysis of 315 Hong Kong newspaper articles on FiT spanning 55 months since the scheme’s implementation. The results indicate that a majority of the articles are framed from enterprises’ perspectives, implying that corporate hegemonic power has penetrated through news; criticisms of FiT are slanted towards the economic aspects, such as the financial incentive instead of the environmental and scientific reasons, undermining citizens’ comprehension of the importance of the scheme; Chinese state-owned media were more critical on FiT than the pro-democracy one, indicating that politics does not matter to the issue. This study proposes that the media should play a watchdog role by monitoring institutions’ ongoing solar power projects and their use of FiT-generated funds to perform the educational function to enhance citizens’ scientific literacy on renewable energy to create a thriving public sphere for conversation and debate on the subject.