When a team of producers at Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) on May 19 heard that the publicly funded broadcaster planned to axe one of its most popular weekly shows, they rushed to the building next door to confront the station’s head.
About 20 producers and employees from RTHK’s TV and radio operations barged into a conference room where Leung Ka-wing (梁家榮), director of broadcasting, was meeting with top executives.
Some staff demanded to know why the station was canceling the satirical and current affairs television show Headliner (頭條新聞) — which had drawn official complaints after poking fun at the Hong Kong police in an episode in February — and whether the move was prompted by pressure from authorities.
Illustration: Yusha
The impromptu meeting lasted about 90 minutes, during which several staffers cried and raised their voices, three people present said.
Leung said that he canceled the show to “protect RTHK” and its staff, they said.
As conversations continued inside the conference room, RTHK announced it was suspending production of the Chinese-language show, which had been running since 1989, at the end of the current season.
RTHK apologized to anyone offended by the station’s output, but did not give a reason for the suspension.
Leung, 67, who made his name in broadcasting during the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing in 1989, declined to answer questions about the meeting.
He denied making the comment about protecting the station, RTHK spokeswoman Amen Ng (伍曼儀) said.
Other executives in the meeting did not reply to requests for comment, and Hong Kong’s government did not comment on whether it had pressured Leung to cancel the show.
RTHK, founded in 1928 and sometimes compared to the BBC, is the only independent, publicly funded media outlet on Chinese soil. It is guaranteed editorial independence by its charter.
The cancelation of Headliner has prompted fear among some journalists that mounting pressure from the Hong Kong government and Beijing would destroy that independence.
Hong Kong reached a boiling point last summer as millions of pro-democracy protesters took to the streets and some of them clashed violently with police, posing one of the biggest challenges to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) since he came to power in 2012.
In response to the protests, China said last month it would introduce national security legislation in Hong Kong to prohibit secession, subversion and external interference.
More than a dozen people working at RTHK and other media organizations said they fear that legislation could be used to silence or shut down independent media in the territory.
The situation is like being under the blade of a guillotine, said Jimmy Lai (黎智英), the publisher of pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper, which, like RTHK, has for years drawn the ire of Hong Kong’s government and Beijing.
“There’s no half-way. It’s falling,” Lai said.
Lai, 72, has been repeatedly denounced by state-run Beijing media and pro-China media in Hong Kong, painting him as the local face of what they describe as a US interference campaign.
He has been arrested twice this year on charges of illegal assembly related to protests last year.
Lai and some other members of the media fear the new legislation — which has not yet been set out in detail — would make Hong Kong more like mainland China, where the ruling Chinese Communist Party runs or controls the vast majority of media and routinely censors dissenting views.
The country imprisoned at least 48 journalists last year, more than any other country, the Committee to Protect Journalists said.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) has denied that the new legislation would curtail media freedom, and last month said that “freedom of expression, freedom of protest, freedom of journalism, will stay.”
Article 27 of the Basic Law, the mini-constitution China agreed to when it took control of the territory in 1997, guarantees Hong Kong freedom of speech and press.
A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the proposed legislation “only targets activities related to subversion, separatism, terrorism and foreign interference into Hong Kong affairs,” and that it would “not affect freedom of speech, media freedoms, or any other rights and freedoms.”
The Hong Kong Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government did not reply to requests for comment on whether China sought to control or suppress RTHK or if the new national security legislation would curtail media freedom in Hong Kong.
Scrutiny of RTHK has increased dramatically since late February, when a two-minute segment on Headliner called “Police Farce Report” showed an actor dressed as a Hong Kong police officer standing inside a large rubbish container with his hands covered in plastic.
The skit shows police in various situations wearing biohazard suits and masks, satirizing how well equipped police officers are compared to medical workers.
The actor, Kwong Ngai-yee (鄺毅怡), said the idea was based on the Sesame Street puppet Oscar the Grouch and that he hoped to “ease public anger through humor.”
Hong Kong police were not amused. Hong Kong Police Commissioner Chris Tang (鄧炳強) in early March complained to Leung in writing, saying the show “smeared the police and their work during the coronavirus period.”
RTHK had “reversed right and wrong, and we simply can’t accept it,” Tang wrote in the letter, which RTHK made public.
On the morning of May 19, the Hong Kong Communications Authority, which regulates the territory’s broadcast and telecom sectors, published a report criticizing the broadcaster, saying the segment “smeared the police by suggesting that the police were trash, worthless and revulsive.”
As the RTHK employees met with Leung that evening, the Hong Kong Commerce and Economic Development Bureau, which oversees RTHK, released a statement on its Web site demanding that the broadcaster examine its production and editorial processes and “follow up or take disciplinary actions” on any staff found to have committed “negligence or errors.”
Nine days later, the bureau announced an unprecedented, government-led review of RTHK’s governance and management — spanning its administration, financial control and manpower — to ensure it complies with its charter. The review is expected to be concluded by the end of the year.
A bureau spokesman said in an e-mail that RTHK has editorial independence, but as a government department, RTHK and its staff “are subject to all applicable government rules and regulations.”
“Ultimately RTHK is part of the government, and in theory it could do anything to us,” said Gladys Chiu (趙善恩), the chairperson of RTHK’s program staff union, which represents about 400 of the station’s 700 staff.
The new legislation and increased scrutiny of RTHK could be used “to coerce the staff into broadcasting or reporting in a way that is approved by the government,” she said.
RTHK also faces pressures at the street level. Small groups of pro-Beijing protesters regularly gather outside its headquarters in Kowloon, waving Chinese flags and signs accusing the broadcaster of anti-government bias.
“Shut it down,” the crowds chanted continuously during one protest in January, video news coverage showed, while calling RTHK a “cockroach” station, a description some police have used to describe pro-democracy protesters.
Some RTHK staff have been threatened in social media posts and targeted in the pro-Beijing media in Hong Kong for perceived anti-government bias.
Some pro-Beijing lawmakers also routinely attack RTHK. One outspoken critic, lawmaker Junius Ho (何君堯), last month demanded the broadcaster become a “government mouthpiece.”
“It’s very worrying because we see RTHK being reined in by every means,” Hong Kong Journalists Association vice chairperson Shirley Yam (任美貞) said.
China and the US have been engaged in a tit-for-tat spat over the presence of the other’s journalists for several months.
The US slashed the number of journalists permitted to work at Chinese state-owned media outlets in the country to 100 from 160, citing a deepening crackdown on independent reporting inside China.
In March, Beijing revoked the media credentials of about a dozen US reporters working in mainland China for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times, saying the reporters would not be allowed to relocate and work in Hong Kong.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement on the Department of State’s Web site last month that the Chinese government “has threatened to interfere with the work of American journalists in Hong Kong,” without giving details.
A source with direct knowledge of the matter said that if the row with the US escalates further, Beijing could intervene in the issuance of work visas for foreign journalists in Hong Kong.
“Visa issues are a matter of national sovereignty. The Chinese government manages affairs related to foreign media and foreign journalists according to laws and regulations,” a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said.
Intervening in the issuance of journalists’ visas would be a highly contentious move for Hong Kong, which although part of China, operates with a high degree of autonomy.
In 2018, Hong Kong did not renew the visa of Financial Times Asia news editor Victor Mallet after he moderated a speech by a pro-independence activist at an event hosted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) in the territory. The move alarmed some diplomats and business groups in Hong Kong.
The event angered China, and a senior official said at the time that the FCC had broken the law by hosting a “separatist.”
Hong Kong authorities never publicly explained why Mallet’s visa had not been renewed, saying they could not comment on individual cases.
Hong Kong’s global media freedom ranking is in free-fall. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said that Hong Kong fell to 80th place this year in its global press freedom index, down from 18th in 2002. Over the past year, reporters covering protests in the territory have been detained, pepper-sprayed and shot with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters by police.
“A security law dictated by China would give a massive blow to press freedom in Hong Kong,” RSF East Asia Bureau director Cedric Alviani said. “[It would] allow the regime to engage in the type of intimidation that we see on their side of the border.”
Additional reporting by Beijing newsroom
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