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The Future of Press Freedom in Hong Kong?
Posted
August 27, 2020
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August 27, 2020
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4:54Now PlayingThe new national security law China is imposing on Hong Kong is creating uncertainty for journalists in the Asian financial, according to Keith Richburg, director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong.
“This place used to be independent of China,” Mr. Richburg said. “You had this rambunctious press, you had open politics. You had people talking freely here. But now you have people whispering over their shoulder. You have people deleting their WeChat accounts. You have people scrubbing their social media.”
Since the imposition of the Security Law, police have arrested Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai and several of his executives and sent hundreds of officers to search the offices of the city’s largest pro-democracy newspaper.
Hong Kong Free Press said the city’s government rejected a work visa application for a new editor. Aaron Mc Nicholas was denied a work visa after waiting for almost six months and was given no reason for the decision, the publication said in a statement. A representative for Hong Kong’s Immigration Department didn’t provide a comment when contacted by Bloomberg.
“It appears we have been targeted under the climate of the new security law and because of our impartial and fact-based coverage,” Editor-in-Chief Tom Grundy said in a statement. “We are a local news outlet and our prospective editor was a journalist originally from Ireland, so this is not another tit-for-tat measure under the U.S.-China trade dispute.”
Founded in 2015, Hong Kong Free Press is one of a handful of local English-language publications in the city and largely covers domestic news, funding itself through donations.
Before Hong Kong Free Press, Mc Nicholas’s last role was at Bloomberg News. A representative for Bloomberg declined to comment.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has made reassurances that “the people of Hong Kong should be able to continue to enjoy the freedom of speech, freedom of press, of publication, protest, assembly and so on.”
Though rare, Hong Kong has rejected visas for journalists before -- Financial Times editor Victor Mallet in 2018 and New York Times reporter Chris Buckley earlier this year. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong this month issued a statement voicing concerns about slow visa issuances to foreign journalists.
“I would just say embrace the challenge,” said Howard Li, a journalism graduate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “Sometimes changes can make you grow, can make you learn how to cope with even challenging stuff, challenging task ahead. And this is what journalists do.”
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