Lan Kwai Fong Hotel

The paparazzi: We have them too

Hong Kong's paparazzi are considered no less adept at digging up dirt than their tabloid counterparts in the UK. And here sometimes even ordinary people are hurt by reporters in pursuit of the sensational headline. Kane Wu reports.

The global paparazzi scene was thrown into an uproar earlier this month, when the UK's most widely read scandal sheet, the News of the World, was brought down, with the paper's senior staff engaged caught up in a scandal of their own making.

Staff members at the paper hacked into the telephones of thousands of people, including murder victims. In one case, the rogue journalists may have destroyed information vital to police investigating the disappearance and murder of a schoolgirl.

The News of the World, whose parent company, News Corporation, run by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, did not invent lurid reporting, but surely his US-based organization has helped to spread sensational reporting around the world.

Paparazzi in Hong Kong are considered no less adept at digging out the news than their British counterparts - except here they are called "puppy teams". In the beginning, they stalked, they peeped and pursued, all in the hope of catching racy photos and scandalous tales to set ablaze the covers of entertainment magazines that sell out on newsstands the day they go on sale.

More recently, paparazzi, photo journalists, who specialize in candid photos of celebrities, politicians and other people of prominence have begun intruding into the lives of ordinary people, says Grace Leung, media commentator and columnist who now teaches at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Leung, who also serves as head of the Ethics Committee of the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA), cites an incident in which six people died in a traffic accident at Lok Ma Chau in 2009. A newspaper reporter approached the family of one of the men killed. Without giving them the tragic news of the death of their father, the reporter interviewed the victim's two sons, who were home alone at the time. In the following day's edition, the newspaper that employed the reporter carried front page photos of the two smiling sons, along with the account of the tragedy.

"People phoned the HKJA, complaining that the reporter had compounded the injury to the victim's family," Leung says. "The Hong Kong media deviate far from its traditional role of watchdog on the government, upholding social justice. The public trust in the media has been severely sabotaged.

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