A letter from the editors
Post editors respond to the Hong Kong Standard's story about our internal editorial guidelines on emotive words.
We read the Hong Kong Standard’s report on A2, “Self-Censorship whiff in ‘locust’ ban” with surprise.
For those who missed it, the senior South China Morning Post editors decided to issue guidance to our newsroom on the use of emotive words, specifically the term “locust”, a patently offensive term used by a group of Hong Kong protesters to describe mainland Chinese.
The Standard wrote about our decision on Wednesday (Feb 26), postulating that it may have been driven by self-censorship and quoted an academic who interpreted our move as being too sensitive.
Both are wrong. Our guidance is simply good, responsible, basic journalism.
We thought we would share with readers the guidance so you can be clear of our intentions:
“We started from the position that the SCMP stands for responsible journalism which is free from bias. We do not stereotype, we do not tolerate bigotry or prejudice and we do not use racial epithets.
"The term 'locust' is clearly being employed as a slur and there is no reason for such inflammatory language to routinely feature on our news file and risk becoming seen as SCMP-endorsed shorthand to describe people from the mainland.