By Maggie Chen
Self-censorship was singled out as a particularly insidious form of censorship at a session on media freedom on Day Two of the International Media Conference.
The chairperson of the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA), Mak Yin Ting, said Hong Kong enjoys less press freedom now than it did before sovereignty of the former British colony reverted to China in 1997.
“The reason for [this] is.. self-censorship”, she said.
In an industry survey conducted by the HKJA in 2007, 58% of respondents said they believed there was less press freedom in Hong Kong than in 1997 and most of these respondents believed that the most important reason for this was self-censorship.
Increasingly fewer stories regarded by journalists as “sensitive to China” have been coming out of Hong Kong, said Mak, such as articles on Tibetan independence, Taiwan and the Falun Gong, a group banned on the mainland.
Kunda Dixit, publisher of Himalmedia and founding editor of the Nepali Times, said self-censorship is “much more dangerous” than direct censorship. In the case of direct censorship, “your readers know that you’re being censored … so they’ll take you with a pinch of salt”.
He said fear of potential libel threats also posed a dangerous form of self-censorship.
Faced with pressure not to write anything critical of Nepalese King Gyanendra after he seized power from parliament in 2005, Dixit recounted how his newspaper indirectly alerted its readers as to self-censorship by including a gauge, “similar to a petrol gauge”, on its masthead. The level changed every week, depending on the amount of self-censorship imposed at the time.
Kine Phelim of Human Rights Watch, Hong Kong, said self-censorship, in addition to active controls on censorship, is widespread in China. “People have a sense of what can and can’t be reported – and they have a tendency not to push the envelope,” he said.
