Source and Message Effects on Reactance to Conflict Reporting: Evidence from Hong Kong

Political news often employs conflict frames to highlight disagreements and non-compromising stances among political camps, potentially influencing public attitudes and behaviors. This study examines how news media in Hong Kong frame political polarization and the consequences of such framing. Study 1, a content analysis of conflict news from 2011 to 2020—a period of rising political polarization—found that news often featured identifiable attacks and uncompromising discourse, mainly targeting government and pro-establishment figures, often criticized by opposing camps. These findings informed the design of stimuli in Study 2, an online survey experiment guided by psychological reactance theory. Study 2 revealed that news with conflict frames—but not the consensus frames as hypothesized—reduced perceived freedom threats, whereas quoting in-group informants heightened such threats, triggering psychological reactance. Reactance, in turn, increased attitude extremity and heterogeneous political discussion intentions. Furthermore, affective polarization moderated the relationship between reactance and attitude extremity but did not significantly affect discussion intentions. Overall, this study contributes to journalism studies by extending the news framing and media effects to a non-Western context, offering insights into how conflict reporting and political polarization interact to shape public opinion and engagement in politically divided societies. © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.