Today, i-Cable News all of a sudden laid off 40 journalists and crew members, including several middle-level managers. The entire team of the award-winning investigative program “News Lancet” was fired.

In support of their colleagues and to protest the company’s decision, 11 editors and senior reporters of China desk, desk heads of the international desk, finance desk and the chief assignment editors, all resigned.

I grew up in a strict household, where my tiger grandmother is a strong believer of “concentration” and therefore would not allow me to read anything other than textbooks. Television was banned as well, except for news reports or political commentary programs, which she thought would be beneficial to my studies. Unlike other kids at school who could play in the park or wander around after school, my brother and I were always requested by our grandma to arrive home before 3:45pm, 30mins after school days ended. No excuses for being late.

So, every day was pretty much the same for me. I woke up to the noise of TVB’s Good Morning Hong Kong, had my breakfast, packed everything and went to school. School dismissed at 3:15pm, I would wait for my brother at the minibus station right in front of the school gate and went home together. We usually took minibus but sometimes we walked to secretly save the money for buying comics or novels we wanted. We dived directly into our homework until 6:15pm, then helped set the table. We would watch also TVB’s News at 6:30pm when having dinner. The content was often the same as it was in the morning but I seized every opportunity to watch the television and never got bored.

That was how I first got to know about people like Anson Chan, Martin Lee, Tung Chee-wah and Wong Yan-lung, and enlightened to learn about the 2008 global financial crisis, 512 Wenchuan Earthquake, 2009 Swine Flu pandemic and a lot of other issues going on in Hong Kong, and around the globe.

Given that was the only way for me to explore the outside world, learn about things that are not written in textbooks, I enjoyed every second watching TVB and never doubted the neutrality and credibility of it.

As I grew up, I entered a secondary school in Shau Kei Wan. Every morning I would take a free copy of Headline Daily and read during the ride but eventually I found that I couldn’t finish the whole paper in the 10 minutes or sometimes even shorter ride. So, I decided to wake up earlier for it. Sometimes I would stand at the minibus stop and finish it before hopping on the last shift to school and sometimes I would hop on earlier shifts to finish it at school. The South China Morning Post was later on added to my reading list because the school made it compulsory to subscribe. I then learnt about concepts of “press freedom”, “freedom of expression”, the important role that the media play as the fourth power in society.

After I was finally given a smartphone, the range of news, articles and commentaries available online flooded me. I finally had the sense of what “freedom of the press” really means, but I took it for granted until last year.

I witnessed frontline journalists being obstructed from reporting, attacked both verbally and physically by the police, doxxed with all personal information posted online, arrested and charged with “illegal assembly” or even “rioting” for being present at protests. It got even worse after the imposition of the National Security Law.

Pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai was arrested; the police stormed into Apple Daily’s headquarters and searched through news materials. Journalists could no longer write without fear; photographs containing slogans like “Free Hong Kong” are considered sensitive and not allowed to be displayed in public. Every media outlet in Hong Kong that remains objective and refuses to kowtow to China is either heavily suppressed or bought up by red capital.

The Chinese Communist Party(CCP) is well aware of the importance of silencing the press so as to take complete control over a place without alerting the international community. The press was also the first target when it started building concentration camps in East Turkestan, brutally cracking down on protests in Tibet and now in Hong Kong. With media groups and journalists heavily censored, we must now make better use of our own power, to spread the word by ourselves, on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and everywhere possible.

If noise is what the CCP is afraid of, we shall never be silenced.

(Joey Siu, Hong Kong activist)

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