Programmes of Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) must comply with the Charter of RTHK (the Charter) and the Producers’ Guidelines (the Guidelines), which require among other things that the programmes must be impartial, unbiased and accurate, and must comply with the Communications Authority’s (CA) Codes of Practices. The programmes of RTHK must abide by the laws of Hong Kong.
In recent years, the management and programme content of RTHK raised widespread public concern. In the past two years, CA ruled that RTHK had breached the relevant codes of practices. The nature of the cases concerned were very serious, and aroused public scrutiny whether RTHK is subject to appropriate monitoring in terms of its editorial principles, stance, programming quality and standards in the production of programmes. The Commerce and Economic Development Bureau released “the Governance and Management of Radio Television Hong Kong Review Report” (the Review Report) in February this year. The Review Report recommended that RTHK should enhance editorial governance, put in place a robust and transparent editorial process, with clearly defined editorial responsibilities at each editorial level and highlighting the decision-making role of the Editor-in-chief and directorate officers.
In order to strengthen the editorial management, RTHK introduced a brand new editorial management mechanism in March this year. An editorial committee which consists of the Director of Broadcasting and the senior management of RTHK has taken up the editorial responsibility to review contentious programmes before their production or broadcast.
In addition, RTHK has also introduced a clearer referral mechanism for programme production staff to submit plans to the editorial meetings for review at the early stage of programme planning, such that the editorial meetings could more proactively participate in and guide the production, thereby ensuring the programmes’ compliance with the Charter and the Guidelines, including that the programmes must be impartial, unbiased and accurate.
RTHK’s editorial decisions are internal management matters of RTHK. Since the introduction of the editorial meetings, three programmes, namely “Hong Kong Stories Season 48” (the episode originally scheduled to be broadcast on 7 March), “LegCo Review” (the episode originally scheduled to be broadcast on 11 March) and “Hong Kong Connection” (the episode originally scheduled to be broadcast on 29 March), were suspended from broadcasting. As all or most production work of these programmes were completed before the introduction of the new referral mechanism mentioned in the previous paragraph, the programmes could not be rectified before production. The main reasons for these programmes to be suspended from broadcasting were that while the topics featured in the programmes concerned were contentious, the programmes were not impartial, unbiased and accurate, and therefore did not comply with the requirements stipulated in the Charter or the Guidelines. Some programmes had inaccurate descriptions of the “Decision of the National People’s Congress on Improving the Electoral System of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” and “The Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region”; some programmes might breach the law or the CA’s Codes of Practices; some programmes only stated the position of one side; and for some programmes, although they interviewed people with different stances, most of the programme content only focused on the opinions of one single side; and there were programmes that covered the situation faced by the interviewees but did not explain the background and causes of the matter.
According to the Charter, RTHK is editorially independent and is immune from commercial, political and / or other influences. RTHK hopes that its editorial decisions would be respected.
