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Press freedom has been taken to extremes in Hong Kong. Any newsroom dispute, irrespective of the cause, can touch off protests by young reporters, together with the usual crowd of self-styled liberal academics and politicians desperate for a chance to step into the limelight.

The firing of a radio talk show host was made out by this group to be an example in the oppression of press freedom while the allegations, mostly unsubstantiated, made by the dismissed woman against her former employer and the government were widely reported by the media. One would suspect that her allegations would have been suppressed if press freedom was indeed reduced.

Of course, Hong Kong people are outraged by the vicious attack on Kevin Lau, former chief editor of Ming Pao. The police have said that at this stage of the investigation, there is no evidence indicating the attack was related to the victim's work as a journalist. But many reporters and some politicians have wasted no time concluding that freedom of the press is once again threatened.

Demonstrations staged by many hundreds of concerned journalists to demand swift action by the police in tracking down the perpetrators of this serious crime were understandable. But it is presumptuous for those politicians to win public attention by branding the case an attack on press freedom.

At the TV licensing hearing in the Legislative Council, a "liberal" legislator raised the concern of "meddling" in news programs by the respective managements of the two stations. In response, representatives of both stations denied they had ever tried to "meddle" in the affairs of their respective news department.

That legislator who raised the question didn't seem to understand what press freedom is. And the denials from these two TV executives looked decidedly disingenuous.

Press freedom applies specifically to the owners of the press. The owners and their representatives to whom management power is delegated have every right to "meddle" in the affairs of any department within the organization, news or otherwise, in ways they see fit.

Purists believe that the owner of the press should be allowed to print anything. Normally, the limit is set by the law of the land. The law in Hong Kong is never seen to be overly restrictive of the press by any standard. And the government knows better than to infringe on the freedom of publishing. In fact, every journalist in Hong Kong knows that the safest way to be sensational is to criticize the government. Rub a property tycoon up the wrong way and you can expect to be slapped with a big law suit.

There have been suggestions of self-censorship by publishers who have sizeable business interests on the mainland. They have every right to do so if they don't care about the future of the publications they own. Hong Kong readers are particularly sensitive to bias and inaccurate reporting. They won't be fooled especially when there is a vast variety of news sources made available to them in cyberspace, which is uncensored in Hong Kong.

The politicians should stop misleading the public about the state of press freedom in Hong Kong and young reporters should refrain from citing the imagined curtailment of press freedom as an excuse for their incompetence and shortcomings in news gathering.

(HK Edition 03/21/2014 page7)