Opinion | Hypocrisy comes to Hong Kong, home-delivered by the Wall Street Journal
By Philip Yeung, university teacher
PKY480@gmail.com
Things have come full circle. The powerful American newspaper Wall Street Journal, touted as a defender of the rights of journalists has just delivered a one-two punch to one of its haloed Hong Kong employees, Selina Cheng, who covered the car and energy sectors in mainland China. Cheng was fired, not for incompetence or conduct unbecoming a reporter, but for, of all things, being elected chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA). In an instant, her star power fizzled out.
Predictably, WSJ flatly denied that there is any connection between Cheng's termination and her election as union chief. It takes refuge behind two hollow excuses--that her being turfed out is due to "restructuring", but in the next breath, it contradicts itself by refusing to comment on individual cases, having already done so. It transpires that her employer had pointedly forewarned her against assuming the union leadership role.
For Selina Cheng, this sudden job loss is a knock-out punch. To add insult to injury, Cheng's first official duty as HKJA chair at her very first conference was to announce her abrupt dismissal by her own employer. She was clearly wrong-footed by this move. After all, her union position is supposed to shield her from precisely this type of arbitrary action. If WSJ wanted to destroy the press union movement, it couldn't have picked a more exquisite time. It left no doubt that this is the fate that will be meted out to any journalist who dares to be a union activist. Union activism is a death sentence. Election to the union chair brought the immediate breaking of her rice bowl. Frontline journalists have become part of international news itself. What should have been a crowning moment of her career has instead become a public beheading by the guillotine. She is now virtually unemployable.
This is uncommon cruelty—decapitating an employee for occupying the union chair. Talk about being two-faced: defending the freedom of journalists with one hand, but taking it away with the other. When its core corporate interests are in danger of being encroached upon, WSJ unceremoniously throws its offending journalist under the bus. At a moment like this, I am tempted to ask Ms Cheng whether she still believes in the phony values spouted by her grandstanding employer, or whether the rights of journalists are mere fiction, evaporating like a snowflake in the blazing sunlight of corporate interests.
But WSJ is not alone in this castration or cowering of journalists. Other would-be office-seekers, too, had come under pressure not to stand for HKJA's board positions.
Other than helplessly expressing her disappointment and outrage, what options are open to Ms Cheng? She is seriously contemplating taking legal action against an almighty news agency. And in doing so, she will be exercising her rights as a resident of Hong Kong, rights that are enshrined in its basic law which forbids punitive actions against workers for being an officer of a trade union.
This case is thick with irony: First, an international newspaper that supposedly champions press freedom and rights for news workers has publicly trampled them while flagrantly breaking local law. Second, the aggrieved journalist's last resort is to seek the protection of the very laws she and journalists of her ilk have been belittling and disparaging.
The double-dealing WSJ believes it can have its cake and eat it too—as a simultaneous defender and destroyer of journalistic rights. Employees who doubt this will suffer Selina's fate. The rest of us can only say: "I told you so."
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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