How Hong Kong’s media law and press freedom have fallen behind, from an ex-HKU professor who taught subject for 17 years
Former lecturer and author of the city’s first English media law book Doreen Weisenhaus says the case of the missing booksellers is a clear sign things have changed and that courageous local journalists are key to moving ahead
Doreen Weisenhaus had a dream job as city editor at The New York Times in 1999 when Chan Yuen-ying, a former New York journalist, came knocking. Chan had been charged with setting up the University of Hong Kong’s (HKU) first journalism programme and wanted Weisenhaus on the team. “What a lark, what an adventure,” she thought, presuming she would do it for just a year.
She arrived in 2000 with her journalist husband and two-year-old son. In her first week on the job, Hong Kong’s privacy commission released a report proposing onerous new privacy laws and fines of up to HK$1 million for anyone violating them. Weisenhaus contacted a top media law expert in the US and together they looked over the report. A few days later they submitted a response to the commission.
“Immediately it dawned on me this was an amazing place for [someone like me] – a journalist, lawyer and academic – because you were on the front row of history and you got to not only see, but to react and be involved,” says Weisenhaus, who ended up staying at HKU for 17 years.
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She was impressed with the vibrancy of media in the city – which had more than 20 newspapers at the time, compared to maybe two or three in an average US city – and wanted to get a good sense of the key issues. So a couple of years into her professorship she led a survey of more than 400 journalists in 40 newsrooms across Hong Kong.
What jumped out was the heavy reliance on off-the-record and anonymous sources in reporting. There was a legal reason for that: Hong Kong is one of the few developed jurisdictions in the world that does not have a freedom-of-information law. Such a law allows access for the general public to data held by governments, including previously unreleased documents. Such laws are in place in many developed countries – the UK, for example, enacted its Freedom of Information Act in 2000 – but Hong Kong has nothing on that level.
Another thing she noticed affecting local media was Hong Kong’s “draconian” defamation laws, a relic of its colonial past from which Britain, in reforming its own laws, has since moved on.