HONG KONG — Dozens of Hong Kong journalists and some of their family members and associates have been harassed in recent months, a leading media professional group said Friday.
Drastic political changes have created an increasingly restricted environment for journalists in the semi-autonomous Chinese city once regarded as a bastion of press freedom in Asia.
Selina Cheng, chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, said in a news conference that this was the largest-scale harassment of reporters in the city that they are aware of.
Cheng said her group found that people describing themselves as patriots have sent anonymous complaints to at least 15 journalists' family members, the employers of their family members, their landlords and other related organizations since June. She said the attacks appeared to be ''systematic and organized" and that she was among those targeted.
Many of the letters and emails threatened the recipients that if they continued to associate with the reporters in question or their family members, they could be endangering national security, the association said.
In addition, posts on Facebook targeting at least 36 journalists called their articles inflammatory and described legitimate reporting as problematic or illegal, the group said. Violent online threats were also made against some journalists and members of the association's executive committee, it said.
''This type of intimidation and harassment, which includes sharing false and defamatory content, and death threats, damages press freedom in Hong Kong and we should not tolerate it,'' Cheng said.
She said they did not find any evidence that the harassment was directly linked to the city's authorities. Several people who were targeted have reported their cases to the police or the privacy commissioner's office, she said. But the journalists organization was concerned about potential data leaks from the government because some information used cannot be easily obtained under normal circumstances.
