The question of establishing a media watchdog for Hong Kong is in the air again. The immediate spark is the coverage by some newspapers and television stations of the gallivanting of Chan Kin-hong after his wife killed herself and their two children.
The story had been worked up by the media as they followed him visiting girlfriends and going to bed with two hairdressers. There was no conceivable public interest involved.
Cases like this often prompt calls for the media to be policed, and the editors and publishers involved find it hard to mount a defence.
Though readers may not want to miss any of the sordid developments, it is difficult for a society to accept the degree to which it is titillated by tales like that of the widower, Mr Chan, or, in Britain, by disclosures about the dalliances of cabinet ministers or, around the world, by the Lewinsky affair.
At first sight, the remedy seems so simple: set up a council of the great and the good with the power to keep the media in line. But examine that proposal for a moment, and the difficulties start to emerge.
Who are these great and good men and women to be: politicians, academics, judges, community figures, representatives of the general public? Would members of the media sit in judgment on their colleagues? Who is to choose the panel, and on what criteria are they to operate? How would such a body operate, and what sanctions could it impose on offenders? Above all, perhaps, who is to lay down the guidelines as to what is permissible and what is beyond the pale? Some cases would be quite clear, but taste is a notoriously difficult area in which to adjudicate. Was the South China Morning Post right to run a dramatic page one photograph on Saturday of a man being beaten in Jakarta? A reader e-mailed me that morning to say how disturbed she was by the image. I would argue that the photograph deserved to be run in part because it was a disturbing image of a disturbing situation.
