Hong Kong’s public broadcaster and television channel, Radio Television Hong Kong, is removing programs from the official tubing website and social networks, causing some to worry that the archives of the massive popular demonstrations against the national security law in Hong Kong will disappear and history will be rewritten. Many netizens have urged people to download backups to preserve history.
After changing its leadership, RTHK reportedly not only stopped broadcasting many of its programs, but also began to take down its videos on the Oil Tube YouTube channel. The official reason explained is to be consistent with the official website of RTHK and only keep the programs of the past 12 months.
However, the RTHK programmers’ union told Ming Pao that RTHK’s official website only has 12 months of programs because of limited server capacity, but the YouTube and Facebook platforms do not have such limitations and do not involve additional expenses. They believe that public broadcasters should increase the dissemination of their programs and make good use of public resources, as the programs of the past are both public resources and the common property of Hong Kong people.
Download backup to protect history
The video on the first anniversary of the “Yuen Long Incident”, which was launched on RTHK’s official YouTube channel on July 13 this year, is still available, with more than 1.6 million views, and many netizens in the comments section below are worried that the program will soon be taken off the air.
As Beijing passed a national security law on June 30, the decision by RTHK awakened anxiety and anger among the pro-democracy camp, according to RFE/RL’s China correspondent Stéphane Lagarde. Some fear that the recent images of a section of Hong Kong people mobilizing against the national security law have been cleansed…
Chris Yeung, president of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, said, “This has caused a lot of anxiety because the programs that were removed were related to sensitive political issues, including the 2019 protests, which sometimes featured images of police brutality against journalists and protesters.” He said, “It appears that the government no longer wants to see these images shared in the public domain and has therefore taken this unprecedented move to remove these programs from platforms such as YouTube.” He claimed that “as soon as RTHK management announced the withdrawal of the programs, netizens immediately mobilized to save them, copy them or send them to their friends because this is Hong Kong history.”
According to news website HKFP, RTHK’s Youtube channel now has more than 1,700 videos since the first video was posted in October 2007, with 46 of them accumulating more than one million views.
Among the programs popular with Internet users, the evocative Cantonese documentaries “Hong Kong Connection” with titles such as “Fear and Freedom” or “Hong Kong, Home of the Crazy Rich and the Enormous Poor” and the satirical program “Headline” were among the first to be removed from the open, free video platform.
According to Standpoint News, today RTHK YouTube videos have been deleted one after another, including a large number of episodes of “The Clash” and the English program “The Pulse”. Former writer-director of “Clang Collection” Choi Yuk Ling responded to the incident with a post describing, “The delete button has been activated and the purge of history has begun at RTHK, or slowly extended to other levels.”
According to several media sources, the Hong Kong government released a review report on RTHK in February this year, listing a number of deficiencies and reform recommendations. The former editor-in-chief of RTHK, Director of Broadcasting, and veteran media personality Leung Ka-wing was “let go” on March 1 and replaced by Lee Pak-chuen, Deputy Secretary General of the Home Affairs Bureau.
According to the United Daily News, since the change in leadership at RTHK, a number of programs have been taken off the air and revamped. According to Ming Pao’s statistics, at least 41 episodes of RTHK’s “ace program” “Clang Collection” have been deleted, including “Complaint”, which explores the police complaint mechanism, and “Beaching”, which is about the pan-democrats’ deployment to fight the Legislative Council election scheduled for September last year, and at least 20 clips of “Headlines” and 26 clips of “Proceedings” have been removed by the uploader. .
The newspaper said that under Beijing’s guidance, the Hong Kong government began to promote the concept of “patriots ruling Hong Kong” while tightening its control over the media. Radio Hong Kong has undergone a major shake-up in this context.
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