Self-Censorship Suspends Press Awards

The FCC decided at the last minute to suspend the HRPA

There is a lot of fury and disappointment over the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Hong Kong for suspending its Human Rights Press Freedom Awards that would have been held on May 3, Press Freedom Day, at the last minute. 

The club's president Keith Richburg, said the decision was made after the board had a lengthy discussion about it on Saturday.

"Over the last two years, journalists in Hong Kong have been operating under new 'red lines' on what is and is not permissible, but there remain significant areas of uncertainty and we do not wish unintentionally to violate the law," he said.

Richburg said suspending awards was unusual

Richburg described the suspension as an unusual step to take just weeks before the winners were to be announced on May 3, acknowledging that it is likely deeply disappointing to the candidates, the judges and everyone else who took part.

He added suspending the awards was a very tough decision to reach, and that it "in now way reflects the FCC Board's view of the content of any of the entries or the work of the independent judges."

Nevertheless, Richburg said the FCC will continue to promote press freedom in Hong Kong, though "recent developments" -- without citing which -- might require changes to the club's approach.

In response, some of the FCC's press freedom committee members resigned, including journalists Shibani Mahtani, Timothy McLaughlin, and Mary Hui. Five other committee members have also reportedly resigned.

"As a former winner and judge of the HRPA, I feel nothing but the deepest regret and do not stand by this decision," said Mahtani, who is the SouthEast Asia and Hong Kong bureau chief for the Washington Post.

Many of the events and talks are held here

"It is an award that meant something not only to Hong Kong, but journalists across Asia who covered some of the most consequential developments in the region last year," she said.

"It is emblematic too of the self-censorship many institutions feel forced to subject themselves to in today's Hong Kong, whether with or without their merits."

It would have been the club's 26th year in handing out awards, and many of them would have been won by Stand News, a pro-democracy news outlet that shuttered late last year.

What is also interesting to note is that the HRPA are traditionally co-hosted by Amnesty International and the Hong Kong Journalists' Association. Amnesty has left Hong Kong, while the HKJA is meeting to discuss whether it should disband or not.

These are the times we live in, but as the Foreign Correspondents' Club, it has an obligation to stand up for press freedom and other human rights, and yet it has cowered from this mandate, choosing instead to stay silent probably in the hopes of being able to renew the lease on the property on Ice House Street.

Mahtani resigned in protest

What is the club good for these days? They hold a few guest speaker talks, but it is mainly run by non-journalists now, and serves cheap drinks (and good curries I heard).

The least the club could do is continue to speak out about press freedom when people like Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai Chee-ying is in jail along with his senior editors, editors at Stand News are languishing in jail, and most recently journalist Allan Au who was arrested two weeks ago.

But it seems the club is more concerned about preserving itself than taking advantage of its unique position and speaking out on behalf of local journalists, as well as the HKJA, where its leaders, currently Ronson Chan, and previously Chris Yeung, risked its position to speak out as much as possible.

Many feel the FCC chickened out and has lost all credibility with the journalism community in Hong Kong -- or what's left of it.

It's no wonder that local journalists never had an interest in joining this club in the first place, which hardly represented them.

Lam says press freedom is protected in Basic Law

Ironically today Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor pronounced that press freedom, which is enshrined in the Basic Law, has been safeguarded and upheld in the SAR since the handover, meaning almost 25 years.

When asked about the FCC suspending its HRPA and political scientist Chung Kim-wah fleeing to the UK, Lam claimed they were isolated incidents.

"So I would say that the two examples you have given are those isolated incidents, which might have given people that impression, especially people who tended to misunderstand the constitutional safeguards for press freedom, and that is one has to observe the law in exercising your freedom," she said.

But journalists are observing the law, and yet they are caught in the crossfire, Mrs Lam... for whatever charges the national security police wish to prosecute them... surely that is the erosion of press freedom...

Review: The Post

Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Kay Graham in The Post

Many years ago I read Washington Post publisher Kay Graham's autobiography, Personal History. I didn't know much about her, but as one of the few women in power in the journalism business, it seemed like a must read.

She was hardly an aggressive powerhouse, instead pleased that her father, Eugene Meyer, had chosen her husband, Philip Graham to take over the Washington Post. However her world fell apart when Philip Graham committed suicide in 1963.

She details her career as The Post publisher

Kay Graham took over and did the smart thing -- hiring people smarter than her. She worked with Ben Bradlee and their major break was publishing the Pentagon Papers that was the inspiration for The Post, starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks.

At first The New York Times was ahead of the game, revealing the American government knew the war in Vietnam was a massive loss of lives, but that it would rather do that than admit going to war there was a mistake.

Then US President Richard Nixon got an injunction to stop The Times from publishing further, which gave The Post the chance to do further coverage.

During the film we see Graham as the only woman in the room full of bankers to discuss a public offering, and at first deferring to Frederick Beebe, the company's lawyer who later became chairman of the board. A character called Arthur Parsons who is a member of the board is fictional, but represents the opinion of many that a woman should not be running a paper.

Graham begins to realize, while the women's movement is happening, that she is the boss, and it is Bradlee's wife Tony, who points out how courageous Graham is to decide to publish the Pentagon Papers.

Publishing the Pentagon Papers was her hardest decision

There is a subtle scene of vindication when she walks out of the Supreme Court and there are women lining the steps as she walks down, admiring her. It's also nice to see one of the top Post journalists was Meg Greenfield, who wrote editorials, but was part of the Pentagon Papers team.

There were also witty remarks here and there, but just barely enough humour to get through the film.

Nevertheless, we also liked the scenes of watching the reporters using rotary phones, using pencils and furiously typing on old school typewriters -- how did the news ever get out like that? They typed the stories out that were then sent to the sub editor who edited them with a pencil.

The story was then sent to be typeset with blocks of words put together into paragraphs. What painstaking work! Once that was put together the presses would run. The film also showed dozens of people putting the paper together, bundling it and distributing it.

Nowadays it's all done on the computer, cutting out many laborious steps as well as staff needed, though newspapers still need reporters to provide stories for the paper. Printing has become more automated and accurate with computers so that there is better printing quality.

Old school newsrooms -- an army of reporters and typewriters

But imagine being in the newsroom at the time when this story was breaking -- that feeling is still important today -- that reporters are to serve the governed, not the governors.

Bradlee's feisty character is how movies like to portray chief editors and for the most part we'd like to think they are -- they set the tone and energy of the paper and employees. The way the reporters were dressed at the time is also pretty accurate -- they were hardly fashion plates and still aren't (except for those covering fashion).

So The Post has a pretty good feel of how people looked and acted at the time, a contrast between high society and scrappy reporters who are determined to tell the truth.

And yes -- Graham really was interrupted during a party when she was asked to make the call whether to publish or not.

The film didn't tug at the heart strings as much as Spotlight, but The Post reiterates the importance of a free press, and that women should not be underestimated.

The Post

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Starring Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks

116 minutes

The (Quiet) China Invasion

Get more news from the motherland right on your doorstep!

State-owned China Daily is flexing its soft power by having its weekend edition distributed in the Saturday paper of the Vancouver Sun, and probably every other newspaper across the country in the Postmedia Network.

In the December 12 edition, there's a message to readers in the top right corner explaining the North America edition of China Daily will be renamed Canada Edition, and that it will be printed in Vancouver.

A letter to readers about China Daily

It goes on to say there will be interviews with Canadian politicians, heads of think tanks, academics and experts on the China-Canada relationship. And there will be profiles of Chinese businesses in Canada, and vice versa. In other words, stories on people who have positive things to say about the Chinese mainland...

Funnily enough it finishes the letter with "Most of all, we want you to enjoy this publication".

Flipping through it, there are lots of soft news stories, like how the Four Seasons Beijing is one of the top hotels in the Chinese capital, complete with a picture of the hotel's general manager receiving an award from the Canadian Consul-General.

It's the perfect platform for politicians and controversial figures to get their message across without the reporter fact checking their statements, and for the government -- oops I mean the paper -- to "report" on what Beijing thinks of Canada.

We wonder how much China Daily is paying to have its paper distributed within a relatively legitimate newspaper. But with print dying a slow death, The Vancouver Sun as well as the mighty Washington Post and has periodic China Daily supplements in The New York Times to supplement its income.

You can't really blame them for being willing accomplices, but at the same time, it is a sneaky way to literally get into potential readers' homes and present another view of China that is thinly-veiled propaganda...