Leung should have avoided unseemly media brawl, but when does press freedom become harassment?
Let’s hurl bricks. Public Eye has plenty prised from a Mong Kok street. Our first brick is aimed squarely at Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying.
Doesn’t he know top leaders are expected to rise above public brawls with media outlets? But brawl he did last week in front of the TV cameras. He named and tried to shame Jimmy Lai Chee-ying’s Next Magazine. You wouldn’t catch US President Barack Obama admonishing a media outlet regardless of how hostile it is towards him.
Next Magazine crossed the line by shadowing Leung’s “baggage-gate” daughter Leung Chung-yan at her US college campus. The US media have an unwritten rule not to shadow Obama’s daughters. But instead of getting into the gutter Donald Trump-style, Leung should have stood tall. He could have advised his daughter to alert college security that unknown people tailing her were distracting her from her studies or seek a court restraining order.
Our next brick has Lai’s name on it. His minions have abused the good name of media freedom. The line between media freedom and harassment became tragically clear when the paparazzi’s pursuit of Princess Diana ended in her death.
It is not media freedom to stalk a student outside her classroom while she studies for exams. What would our self-proclaimed defenders of media freedom say if the left-wing Wen Wei Po stalked student leader Joshua Wong Chi-fung while he attended class? They would call it white terror.
Our third brick is aimed at the Hong Kong Journalists Association. It leapt to Next Media’s defence, saying what it did was media freedom. Is it media freedom for two reporters to stalk outside Chung-yan’s classroom? How is she expected to focus on her schoolwork?
That smacks more of white terror than Wen Wei Po’s attacks on former Hong Kong University law dean Johannes Chan Man-mun. Yet when Chan’s chums accused Wen Wei Po of white terror the Journalists Association didn’t defend the paper’s coverage as media freedom.
The funny thing about all this is it’s media freedom to shadow Chung-yan for her side of the “baggage-gate” story but when she offered to tell it to Airport Authority investigators, politicians labelled it as interference.