Opinion | Why Asia-Pacific governments should let independent news thrive

Name: National security police arrest Hong Kong veteran journalist on sedition allegations
Uploaded: 2022-07-31T04:45:20.000Z
Duration: 1 min 20 s
Description: National security police arrest Hong Kong veteran journalist on sedition allegations

A lack of protection or even downright crackdowns on news and journalists hurt more than liberal freedoms – markets and economic growth also depend on the free flow of news and information to thrive

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People in Hong Kong look at screens showing President Xi Jinping giving a speech in October 2020. The news is an indirect driver of economic activity as businesses depend on accurate information to make key decisions. Photo: SOPA Images via ZUMA Wire / dpa

Byron Perry

Published: 12:45pm, 31 Jul 2022

A free and thriving news industry is essential to a functioning society – not just because quality journalism serves as the public’s bulletin board, commentator, fact checker, historian and conscience, but also because it plays an important yet often overlooked role in catalysing economic growth.

Besides the news industry’s commercial activity and job creation, businesses also depend on the accurate information it publishes to make key decisions, cementing the news as an indirect driver of economic activity. Without the free flow of credible and verifiable information provided by the news, the resulting lack of decision-making and investing confidence hinders both market and business growth.

Despite these proven benefits, many governments in the Asia-Pacific are moving in the wrong direction in their treatment of the media industry – in some cases, downright cracking down on news.

In the Philippines, for example, crusading digital news outlet Rappler, led by Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa, has been ordered to close down. In India, the government turns a blind eye to the large-scale coordinated harassment of journalists. In Singapore, a new law allows government ministers the singular power of declaring that a news story is false and ordering it to be taken down.

And in Hong Kong, a vaguely worded and aggressively applied national security law has led to the arrest of journalists, the closure of several publications, and a strong chilling effect on free speech.

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National security police arrest Hong Kong veteran journalist on sedition allegations

Against this backdrop, there has, unsurprisingly, been a lot of gloomy sentiment about the media industry in the last few decades. It has even become a bit of a cliché to say the industry is dying.