The fourth stage was to obtain lists of all journalists working for these eight television stations, 14 radio stations and 15 daily newspapers. We called the managing editors and the directors of personnel department of all these news organizations and requested them to provide all names and positions of all editorial personnel working for their organizations. By so doing, we were able to obtain lists of all journalists working for all these media in our sample.
The final stage was to draw a random sample of individual journalists. This was done in two steps. The first step was to draw a random sample of daily newspaper journalists. From the names of journalists provided by each of these 15 daily newspapers we selected a random sample of 803 daily newspaper journalists.
The second step was to draw a systematic sample of broadcast journalists. From the names of broadcast journalists provided, it was estimated that the total full-time journalists working for these radio and television stations to be around 790. A sample of 414 broadcast journalists was drawn systematically including 253 television journalists and 161 radio journalists. Radio and television journalists were deliberately oversampled to ensure adequate numbers for comparison with each other and with daily newspapers.
Before formal interviews were conducted, letters were sent to each of these 1,217 journalists in the sample telling them the purposes of the study and asking for their cooperation. In addition, the questionnaire was pre-tested twice and minor changes were made in the wording of some of the questions. Personal interviews were conducted during a four-week period in July 1996. Of the total 1,217 journalists, 834 (68.5 percent) completed the questionnaires for analysis. Of those responding to the questions, 102 (12.2 percent) were radio journalists, 117 (14.0 percent) were television journalists and 615 (73.7 percent) were daily newspaper journalists. The respondents were asked to indicate their perception of the future economic and political prospects of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan on a 5-point scale ranging from very good to very bad. A total of 50 interviewers were employed and trained for this study. All of them were students at the National Chengchi University.
The three newspapers carried a total of 353 news items including 303 news/analysis stories and 50 editorial/commentary items. Of these, 217 appeared on the two Taiwan dailies (181 news/analysis stories and 36 editorial/commentary items) and 136 appeared on the China newspaper (122 news/analysis stories and 14 editorial/commentary items).
