There used to be a traditional English saying that it was no use locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. This of course dates back to the days when horse metaphors were instantly understandable.
The Broadcasting Commission proposes a new variation on this ancient notion of foolishness: it wants to unlock the stable door after the horse has bolted.
The commission is now engaged in “consulting the public” about a proposal to water down a requirement imposed on all broadcasters, that controversial news items are covered properly. As HKFP put it: “Under the authority’s TV Programme Code and Radio Programme Code, licensees must ‘ensure due impartiality is preserved’ in news and current affairs programmes about public policy or issues of public importance in Hong Kong. Due impartiality requires licensees to ‘deal even-handedly’ when opposing points of view are presented.”
It now appears to the commission that this may be seen as conflicting with a more recent requirement imposed on broadcasters, that they must devote at least 30 minutes a week to “national education, national identity, and the national security law.”
The public is now to be consulted about the possibility of exempting the prescribed patriotic half-hour from the impartiality requirement.
The funny thing about this is that Hong Kong broadcasters do not seem to be having any problem with the impartiality requirement. They interview government officials, whose correctness is beyond dispute. They interview Legislative Councillors, 89 of whom are proud members of the People’s Puppets. Issues of public importance involving opposing points of view are as rare as hen’s teeth.
Admirable balance was preserved in the coverage of the great golf course land grab, with various public figures coming up with interesting reasons why public housing should not be built on their playplace.
Apart from this, contentious public issues have been thin on the ground, and troublesome people are no longer interviewed. Many reliable sources of “opposing points of view” are in prison. Some others are understandably intimidated. Journalists who are still interested in such things worry about the possible consequences of tactless interviews for them, and their contacts.
In short, I don’t know what the commission is talking about. The impartiality problem has been solved because on many important matters, there is only one permissible opinion.
It is still a shame to see it abandoned. Impartiality is not an end in itself: it is an indispensable aid in the search for truth, which in turn requires the recognition that the truth is often elusive and no one source has a monopoly of it.
Actually there is no reason why “national education” could not be conducted in an impartial way. No nation has a completely unblemished history and no modern society is without problems. National identity is an interesting concept which can be approached from a variety of points of view, and the national security law – wonderful creature though it is – is surely not so perfect as to be altogether beyond criticism.
There is a danger that patriotic programming will become so formulaic and, indeed, propagandistic that viewers and listeners will be unable to take it seriously and it will consequently be a failure.
Broadcasters should not be expected to instruct us that Mr Xi is a cross between Confucius, Einstein and God. Hongkongers with access to a wide variety of uncensored China news will not be impressed by the insistence that the People’s Paradise is without fault or flaw.
John Stuart Mill wrote that “Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field.”
But that is from On Liberty, a book which I fear can no longer be regarded as acceptable in a Hong Kong public library. Indeed eSports (video games played for money) briefly visited the news pages last week because a competitor’s nom de guerre included the word “Liberate.” He was suspended for three years.
Let us turn then to John Milton, whose Areopagitica is harmlessly named after a Greek hilltop. Milton was an active and paid government propagandist during the Commonwealth (1649-60, since you ask) and relevantly wrote this: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”
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