Posted by I remember when Apple Daily came to town in 1985 giving away free Apples as a gimmick and reducing the cover price to HK$2 when the Newspaper Society of Hong Kong had a standardised price of HK$5 for all papers in the city. According to Wikipedia, “The newspaper was modelled after USA Today, with printing in full colour and concise writing. It also extensively used written Cantonese, when most Hong Kong newspapers used written vernacular Chinese, and a focus on reporting crime, celebrity news, eroticism, gambling, and drug use. It carried at least three pages of entertainment news at the beginning but this was increased by eight pages by 2000.”
I find this assessment mostly accurate and Wikipedia has this to say about USA Today, “Its dynamic design influenced the style of local, regional, and national newspapers worldwide through its use of concise reports, colorized images, informational graphics, and inclusion of popular culture stories, among other distinct features.”
Yes, rather than make you slog through all that text and big fancy difficult words, they decided that people wanted less and easier words and large colour infographics to tell them what to think rather than actually having to digest a ton of facts and think for themselves. I remember clearly at that time that I thought Apple Daily was importing the dumbing down of news via the USA Today effect and I was right. Was Apple Daily popular? Yes, it did have the second highest circulation being outsold by rival Oriental Daily (東方日報) which was founded in 1969 but quickly changed format to copy the Apple Daily style.
Journalism scholar Paul Lee said the establishment of Apple Daily has changed the Hong Kong newspaper ecosystem by transforming broadsheet newspapers into tabloids. Lee said newspapers with a high circulation, such as Apple Daily, The Sun and Oriental Daily, are known for their tabloid journalism as well as making mainstream reporting (see middle-market newspaper). Apple Daily did not join the self-regulation panel of the Newspaper Society of Hong Kong.
Apple Daily attracted public criticism in 1998 for a report about a woman who jumped off a building after pushing her children out the window. The woman’s husband was widely reported to have little remorse for the deaths of his wife and children. Apple Daily published a photo of the man with two prostitutes soon after the deaths. It was then revealed that the newspaper had paid the man to pose for the photograph, for which Apple Daily issued an apology after public outcry. In the same year, Apple Daily ran a front-page article claiming that lawyer Jessie Chu Siu Kuk-yuen absconded more than HK$2 million of clients’ money her law firm. Apple Daily was ordered by a court to pay Chu more than HK$3.6 million in damages for defamation. n 2000, an Apple Daily reporter was sentenced to 10 months in jail for bribing police officers for information on criminal cases.
I personally was a victim of this tabloid style “loose with the facts” style reporting as they made up a story after I was made redundant from my job following the market crash after the 9/11 attack. They were fishing for a story about how high paid financial types (ie, Wall Street investment bankers) were also being sacked. Not one of the facts they posted were true as they just made them up. So let’s not kid ourselves. The Apple Daily is not a New York Time or Washington Post. It is not a reputable news institution with strong investigative reporting. If I had to describe it properly, It is more as if the National Enquirer and USA Today merged into one with the emphasis more on the scandals and conspiracy theories of the former rather than just puff news pieces of the latter. In other words, the Apple Daily did Hong Kong a grave disservice by basically dumbing down real newspapers (and causing many to outright go out of business) by appealing using tabloid style titillations to garner mass market appeal of the lowest common denominator.
So this is what the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation has to say on the subject, “Hong Kong pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily to halt publishing Thursday.” “Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper will stop publishing Thursday, following last week’s arrest of five editors and executives and the freezing of $2.3 million US in assets under the city’s year-old national security law.”
Apple Daily has been outspoken in defending Hong Kong’s freedoms, and in recent years has often criticized the Chinese and Hong Kong governments for limiting the city’s democratic freedoms as well as constricting the rights of free speech and assembly not found on mainland China.
The paper has in recent years come under increasing scrutiny over its pro-democracy stance. Its founder, media tycoon Jimmy Lai, is facing charges under the national security law for foreign collusion and is currently serving a prison sentence for his involvement in unauthorized assemblies in 2019, during a time of massive anti-government protests in the city.
The police operation against Apple Daily drew criticism from the U.S., the E.U. and Britain, which say Hong Kong and Chinese authorities are targeting the freedoms promised to the city when the former British colony was returned to China in 1997.
One thing the CBC did get correct is that Apple Daily is a tabloid. It was certainly not a great news organisation like the New York Times and if this is what you think is beacon of freedom and champion of democracy should be like then both of those are in deep trouble. Most of the people and the foreign press reports who ape that are mostly white and can’t read Chinese so have never actually read the Apple Daily ever. But still, they are ready to judge and make opinions based on something they have no first hand information about. Yes, the Apple Daily pissed off many people, especially powerful businessmen and entertainers with its Paparazzi style reporters. And not only in Hong Kong and China, its sister paper of the same name got into much trouble in “democratic” Taiwan for similar reasons and constantly bled money from its parent company in Hong Kong which is why they tried to sell it. The CBC and other western reports can say that this is just another example of Beijing clamping down on Hong Kong and press freedoms. It is fine for a paper to take an editorial view but Apple Daily along with its owner and editors went above and beyond that by constantly inciting people to take to the streets to protest and riot as well as encouraging foreign governments to slap sanctions on Hong Kong. Apple Daily did, as legislator Regina Ip stated, “had some entertaining features, but since its establishment, the owners and editors had weaponised the newspaper to incite disaffection and hatred.” I for one am happy to see the demise of the Apple Daily and its corrosive low-brow reporting that played fast and loose with facts and real analysis. It may have been a feisty advocate of democracy, but the way it went about doing it was no different than its tabloid style paparazzi reporting that it was far more famous, and popular, for.