THE PROPAGANDA ARM of the Government is to broadcast its own version of a daily news bulletin on the Internet from next year, in an apparent attempt to cut through the media clutter at a time of rising public discontent.
Selected information officers will double up as reporters to package the official messages in the form of final news products, rather than just raw materials. It remains to be seen whether bona fide journalists will find themselves in an awkward position, having to compete with government information officials for sound-bites.
GIS management has already visited some top online news operations in the West to see how it's done, and officers who are former TV news presenters have been assigned trial runs. The plan has been enshrined in the latest policy objectives of the Information Technology and Broadcasting Bureau. The idea is to 'launch in 2002 an online news bulletin to put out government news, interviews and information through multimedia and to communicate interactively with the community in an innovative manner'.
It is difficult to quantify how much the new promotion strategy of GIS will cost. But a typical local commercial news and information portal is suffering from a burn rate of between $3 million to $5 million a month. The department has been given an annual budget of $600 million, including staff costs for its 500 personnel. It is not uncommon for a Government to fund its public broadcasters. Under normal circumstances however, a democracy would have little editorial control over such institutions as the BBC. The United States Government's recent run-in with the Voice of America over an interview with a Taleban militia leader is an exception due to extra sensitivity caused by the war in Afghanistan.
RTHK has found itself caught in an embarrassing situation. Despite its insistence on editorial independence, it has been subject to all sorts of political pressure to toe the Government line. Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's recent open criticism of RTHK's Headliner programme, which he described as being in 'bad taste' because of a satirical comparison of the SAR Government with Afghanistan's ruling Taleban, has highlighted the conflicting expectations of RTHK's role.