History
Apple Daily was founded by Jimmy Lai Chee Ying on June 20, 1995. Unlike newspapers at that time, it used colour printing on all pages of the newspaper and did not allow advertisements covering the complete front page. Since then, it has attracted a large readership. Other newspapers followed suit, and a few were forced to close due to intense competition by Apple Daily. Techniques used by Apple Daily to gain readership included price warring, extensive use of written Cantonese, at a time when most Hong Kong newspapers used written vernacular Chinese, and a focus on reporting crime, celebrity news, eroticism, gambling, and drug use.
The newspaper uncovered many political scandals, including a former member of the Legislative Council not reporting conflict of interest in 2000, a former Financial Secretary Antony Leung for tax evasion on a Lexus LS 430 which saved him HK$50,000 (USD $6,400), and many others, leading to the convictions or forced resignations of those individuals.
Apple Daily often criticizes the Central Government of China and pro-China governments in Hong Kong. Just prior to July 1, 2003, the newspaper encouraged people to take to the street and protest against the government. On that day of protest, it prepared banners and newspaper front pages for the public to carry and protest. The 2003 protest drew 500,000 citizens (the third largest protest ever seen in Hong Kong) to the Hong Kong July 1 marches. Since then, it has been viewed as the newspaper that helped carry the message of protest against the government.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)