Here’s a riddle. The other week, Yazhou Zhoukan, a news magazine that has been baffling foreigners since the early 1990s in their attempts to pronounce the name correctly, hosted an event and invited a guest to address the assembled crowd.

The guest was the Secretary for Security Chris Tang. This is an odd choice. In the days when I was often invited to or headed such things, you usually got the director of information services. This person at least had some knowledge of media matters, although I remember interviewing a recent graduate on an RTHK programme who suffered not so much from stage fright as from television terror.

On particularly important occasions you could get the Minister of the Interior, who was responsible for the government’s media policy. Sometimes more prestigious people than me could bring in the leader of the city. No one thought the security chief would be relevant.

See also: Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao urges columnists to be ‘cautious’ and ‘law-abiding’

Tang is also an odd choice because he has a rather clouded view of media affairs and his oratorical repertoire does not extend to the “soft response that deflects anger.” Indeed, his thoughts on reporting tend toward Trumpism with Hong Kong characteristics: complaints about “fake news” and warnings of the anger yet to come.

As expected, he came with a complaint about an anonymous newspaper and an anonymous columnist. Experts immediately recognized it as a reference to Ming Pao and Johannes Chan, who writes for the newspaper about legal matters.

And he warned that no protection from problems could be obtained by a precaution widely adopted in the Hong Kong press, namely the insertion at the end of an article of a section stating that if a piece is critical, it “is intended to point out errors or defects in the system, policy or measure… The purpose is to facilitate the correction or elimination of such errors or defects… There is absolutely no intention to stir up hatred, discontent or hostility against the government or other communities.”

This is a rough summary of part of the old definition of sedition in the Crimes Ordinance, incorporated with minor amendments in the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, which states that the pointing out of defects with a view to their correction shall not be regarded as seditious. Sober discussion of public policy is still permitted.

In fact, I don’t think any of the newspapers that have taken this precaution assume that it offers any protection. It’s more of a preemptive reminder to readers in the law and order industry that some speech still has legal protections. Obviously, if the article prior to the precaution called for the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party or the assassination of its chief executive, there will still be legal consequences.

Tang’s message was that “foreign columnists” had “deliberately misinterpreted government policies or official speeches and misled readers.” If a newspaper “approves of such writers and their biased essays, it will have corrupted society and created divisions.”

Editors had a responsibility to ensure that a publication was “fair, objective and impartial,” he concluded.

Well, the short answer to that is that the quest for fairness and objectivity doesn’t seem to bother the media, which is in the government’s pocket, in fact or in practice. Is Ta Kung Pao fair and impartial? Is China Daily?

The long answer is that this is a simplistic answer to a very complex question. Public policy problems often do not lend themselves to a treatment that satisfies all the stakeholders involved.

A good example is the controversy Tang had in mind. Chan, who as a former dean of the law faculty at the University of Hong Kong may know something of what he is writing about, argued that recent legislation restricting national security prisoners’ access to early release schemes could infringe on their human rights.

The government’s response, which was attributed to the Correctional Services Department (CSD) but appeared to come from the same Outrage Factory as similar complaints about other cases, said Chan’s essay was “factually incorrect” because early release “has never been a guaranteed right under Hong Kong law.”

But this is based on a misunderstanding. Of course, a prisoner had no guaranteed right to early release, any more than someone taking a driving test had a guaranteed right to a driver’s license.

But the early release policies are not some mysterious gift that the CSD bestows on deserving prisoners. They are governed by statutes and rules. So it is at least arguable that changing the rules after the prisoner has been sentenced violates his right to be treated according to the laws that were in effect when he committed the offense.

The response went on to say that Chan had “misled readers into believing that if a (prisoner) is not granted a pardon… this would amount to a more severe sentence and a violation of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights.”

Here we may have a linguistic problem. I assume it is true that whether a prisoner is denied parole or granted it, the punishment remains the same in either case. The prisoner who is granted parole is still expected to abide by the rules of supervision, residence, and good behavior. If they violate the terms of their parole, they can be taken in and serve the remainder of their sentence inside. So in that rather pedantic legal sense, it is true that a prisoner who is denied parole does not receive a more severe punishment.

On the other hand, someone who expects to be able to apply for parole after two years and then finds that a change in the rules will land him in jail for three years would probably, quite rightly, regard this in everyday language as ‘equivalent to receiving a heavier sentence’.

Definition of “equivalent” in the Cambridge Dictionary: “being nearly the same or having the same effect as something, usually something bad.”

When dealing with complex issues of opinion, the idea of ​​being “fair, objective and impartial” will not get you very far. When reporting on simple conflict situations, fairness can be offered, or at least simulated, by giving equal attention to both sides: employees and employers, Tories and Labour, prosecution and defence, Manchester United and Liverpool (unless you work for a Liverpool newspaper).

Objectivity is considered a myth by philosophers. I cherish the memory of a student speaker in a debate at the London School of Economics who provoked much laughter by announcing that he intended to discuss the “objective situation as I see it.” Well, we can all only see the objective situation as we see it. For reporters, objectivity is a style: third person, no evaluative or emotional words, all facts attributed to sources or speakers, and so on.

Impartial is the code for agreeing with the speaker. Should we be impartial on crime, domestic violence, traffic accidents, genocide…?

There is also an important difference between writing facts and writing opinions. Facts, as an early Guardian editor put it, are sacrosanct. In their pursuit, honesty and objectivity are legitimate goals, however elusive they may be in practice. Writing opinions is a different story.

The writer of an opinion piece is trying to persuade. Being honest with your opponent can help you be persuasive, but it is not mandatory. Of course, you will not be objective and you will certainly be biased. But opinions are specifically protected by Section 24 of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, which includes the phrase “expressing an opinion.”

Let’s see if we can phrase this in a way that helps Tang. That Tang is the secretary for security is a fact. That Hong Kong would be a happier place if someone less aggressive did the job is an opinion.

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