Hong Kong's Public Service Media Under Siege: What Is RTHK's Future?

The dramatic changes in the world in recent years have created huge crises for public service media (PSM). The erosion of capital and increasingly stringent government controls have led to a dramatic decline in democracy, while some PSMs have also begun to undergo significant changes. Many studies have previously examined the pressures that PSMs are facing in strong democracies, but few have focused on PSMs in neo-authoritarianism countries or countries under transitions. RTHK is one of them. As the only public service media in Hong Kong history, it has witnessed tons of political changes in this region in the past six decades. But the dramatic changes of Hong Kong in the past two years seem to have shaken the foundations of RTHK. Especially after the implementation of the National Security Law (NSL) in Hong Kong, there are voices from the industries and the academia claiming that RTHK has been deviating from its original PSM route and heading towards the Hong Kong version CCTV instead. This research attempted to explore this issue. Unlike previous studies of media freedom that usually applied survey or content analysis, this paper focused on the policies and regulations related issues. This research used document analysis to compare RTHK with PSMs in the West Balkan countries which have undergone democratic transition and tried to identify several indicators that show whether RTHK deviated from its original route at the policy and practice level.

After analysing PSM-related policy documents and specific implementations in Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia, it was possible to conclude three key issues that commonly happen to the PSMs in countries that have undergone democratic transition. These issues also happened in RTHK in the past two years. The first issue is at the organizational level. This level mainly refers to the structure within the PSM, such as nominations and appointment of management and supervisory bodies. Because RTHK is a government department, it is simple to assign a high-ranking civil servant as the director at will, though the government has been appointing media practitioners as its chief from 1986-2011. The new RTHK director of broadcasting Patrick Li is the proof of the former. Since he took up his position in early 2021, several shows were removed and cancelled, which suggested the direct political interference on RTHK. The second issue is at the functional level. It refers to the practice in the newsroom under the charter or regulations. The common problems are lack of transparency, marginalization/politicization of supervisory bodies, and terrible editorial. Even though RTHK managed to avoid most of the functional related problems, it failed to produce high quality programs that promote citizenship and nation. Similar to the situation in Macedonia, RTHK’s ways of promoting citizenship and nation are synchronizing CCTV programs and China National Radio (CNR)(The CNR frequency used to carry BBC world service), which turned the programs into the mouthpiece of the China Communist Party. The third issue is at the financial level. Consistent with the direct funding model, RTHK is directly funded by the government, which gives the government all the convenience to cut its budget, and that has taken place in the last year.

Even though the government is trying to convince the public that RTHK is still performing the public servicing role in Hong Kong, from the above discussion, it is possible to conclude that RTHK is losing its original status. Moreover, with the implementation of the NSL, the scale of RTHK’s diversity is shrinking, as the trending ideologies suddenly become illegal. This research could set the foundation of future empirical research which aims to discuss the future of public servicing in Hong Kong.