South China Morning Post Article by Frank Ching

Editorial | Observer | By FRANK CHING
Sending the wrong signal on RTHK
2007-04-10

When the government last year appointed a panel to look into public service broadcasting, there was strong speculation that its real purpose was to bring RTHK to heel and turn it into a government mouthpiece. Defenders of RTHK - and there were many - demanded loudly that the government continue to honour the broadcaster's editorial independence.

The panel's chairman, Raymond Roy Wong, was taken aback by the vociferousness of the demands. He assured all and sundry that the committee would respect freedom of the press, and that it had no intention of weakening or dismembering RTHK. During the year-long discussion, the public assumed that the committee was going to come up with a way to end RTHK 's status as a government department and turn it into a genuine public service broadcaster.

It came as a great surprise, therefore, when the committee's report recommended the creation from scratch of a body that would have nothing at all to do with RTHK - except to take over all its functions as a public service broadcaster. What would become of RTHK? The committee's report does not spell it out in so many words, but the impression is inescapable: RTHK's intended fate is to become a government mouthpiece.

The committee's report said, any proposal to modify RTHK into a public broadcaster [would pre-empt the government's] decision on what role it may assign to RTHK, as a government department; and that falls outside the committee's terms of reference. This is very strange. Many groups and individuals called for precisely such a proposal. Yet the committee did not see fit to declare that it could produce no such thing.

The committee was set up to recommend an appropriate arrangement for the provision of public service broadcasting in Hong Kong. So its members would apparently have been perfectly within their remit to propose that the main public service broadcaster, RTHK, should be transformed into the new broadcasting entity.

If this was not an option from day one, why did the committee not make that clear? Why string the public along when the committee had no intention of considering any such proposals? Why not say immediately that its terms of reference precluded it from doing so? The committee says it did not want to pre-empt any government decision on what role to assign to RTHK. And yet, in its report, it does exactly that: there is a whole section entitled, The role of RTHK.

The report, in fact, proposes that RTHK be stripped of all its public broadcasting functions. It then speaks of the reduced role of RTHK. Presumably, that role is serving as the government's mouthpiece.

No one needed the committee to come up with abstract principles of what a public broadcaster should be. What was needed was a practical solution to the current problem, which was RTHK's ambiguous status. There has been much talk in recent months about the importance of collective memory. RTHK has been broadcasting since the 1920s, and generations of Hongkongers grew up with it.

It is an indelible part of the city's collective memory. It would be sacrilegious to dismember RTHK and turn it into a government mouthpiece. Despite the committee's proposals, this does not have to happen.

After studying the report, the government will issue a consultation paper. The final decision, therefore, should lie in the hands of the public. There is no reason why the consultation paper couldn't propose, as one option, transforming RTHK from a government department into an independent entity - Hong Kong's public broadcaster.

This is an option with a great deal of public support. If the government omits it from the consultation paper, the consultation will be seen as an exercise in which the government has already decided the outcome.

Frank Ching is a Hong Kong-based writer and commentator. frank.ching@scmp.com

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