When the Press Turns Its Back on Press Freedom

Hong Kong’s leaders have found plenty of help—whether from active colluders, the silently complicit, or the simply fearful—during their five-year campaign to rid the city of opposition and dissent. This week, the editors of one of America’s most prominent newspapers may have made an unexpected contribution: A Wall Street Journal reporter says she was fired after choosing to stand up for press freedom in Hong Kong.

Earlier today, Selina Cheng, a Journal reporter based in Hong Kong, announced in a statement that she had been fired shortly after she was elected chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association. The HKJA is the city’s largest journalism union and advocates for press freedom. Ever since Hong Kong’s government quelled prodemocracy protests in 2019, it and the Chinese state media have made a point of attacking the HKJA for supposedly destabilizing and bad-mouthing the city.

Cheng told reporters at a press conference outside the Journal’s Hong Kong office that her editors had pressured her not to run for chair of the association last month. They also asked her to step down from the association’s board, of which she’d been a member since 2021, she said. Cheng refused the requests, even though she says she was told that doing so was “incompatible with my job.”

[Read: A newsroom at the edge of autocracy]

“The right for reporters to work without fear must be protected not just by the law, but more crucially by ourselves—reporters, editors, and publishers,” she said today.

A spokesperson for Dow Jones, which publishes the Journal, responded to a request for clarification by email. “While we can confirm that we made some personnel changes today, we don’t comment on specific individuals,” the email said, adding that the newspaper “has been and continues to be a fierce and vocal advocate for press freedom in Hong Kong and around the world.”

Hong Kong’s press freedoms have drastically constricted since 2019, according to Reporters Without Borders. Cheng’s dismissal highlights the insidious effect of two sweeping, draconian national-security laws in this regard. The power of these laws, enacted in 2020 and earlier this year, is amplified by fear, which can lead organizations to go even further than the mandates demand.

Before she went to The Wall Street Journal, Cheng, a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, worked as an investigative reporter at HK01, a Chinese-language outlet. There she did the type of reporting that was once the hallmark of Hong Kong’s spirited press corps. In 2017, she published a three-part series revealing accusations of sexual harassment against an associate of the disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Another of her investigations detailed horrific conditions and child abuse at a school for special-needs children in Hong Kong.  

Starting around 2019, however, such reporting became more and more perilous in Hong Kong, as the city’s government homed in on what it called “soft resistance,” a catchall phrase for views that the authorities disliked. Numerous media outlets, including the prodemocracy newspaper Apple Daily, have been forced to close, and the ranks of journalists in the city have thinned considerably.

Cheng worked briefly for the independent Hong Kong Free Press, then joined The Wall Street Journal in 2022. In June, she was elected chair of the HKJA. The association had already endured waves of intensifying pressure. The HKJA’s previous chair told me that he had been doxxed and frequently tailed around the city. Earlier this month, the Chinese-nationalist Global Times published a lengthy “investigation” into the HKJA, concluding that the association had a “spotty history of colluding with separatist politicians and instigating riots in Hong Kong.” The outlet described Cheng’s election as “absurd and disturbing” and singled out her reporting for the Journal as “attacking” Hong Kong’s laws.

These days in Hong Kong, a verbal assault from state media or officials can be enough to spur a hasty retreat. The fear is understandable: Those charged under Hong Kong’s new laws are almost always convicted, and almost never granted bail. Many Hong Kongers may decide that the risk is too great, and no one should judge them for it.

[Read: How China weaponized the press]

But large, international organizations with reach and influence are another matter. When these companies act preemptively out of fear, they provide cover for officials who can rightly point out that the organizations acted of their own accord. Some apparently find it easier to jump than even to risk being pushed.

“This is how press freedom dies—in seemingly minor accommodations and compromises that add up over time,” Sheila Coronel of Columbia Journalism School wrote in a LinkedIn post. The observation applies broadly across Hong Kong, where many institutions have been corroded by timidity over the past five years.

The Atlantic reported in 2022 that major news outlets told their reporters not to run for president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Hong Kong for fear of political backlash. One of those outlets was the Journal. Similar pressure tactics appear to have failed with Cheng, who survived a round of layoffs in May.  

According to Cheng’s statement, a Journal editor told her that newspaper employees could not be seen as advocating for press freedom in Hong Kong, even though such advocacy was allowed in Western countries, where press freedom is established. The apparent double standard is striking: The Journal seemed to have no problem with Cheng’s reporting on the city’s diminishing freedoms, but has allegedly drawn a line at the notion that she would directly defend those freedoms.

Such irresolution is particularly baffling coming from a newspaper that has, commendably, spared no effort to free Evan Gershkovich, its reporter who is detained in Russia. The Journal has a landing page dedicated to Gershkovich, with a timer clocking his days in jail.

“The necessity for journalists to uphold and defend press freedom is not relative to where we are in the world,” Cheng said in her statement. That sentiment is one that the Journal, until recently, appeared to share.