The ideas of free trade and a laissez faire government have always been consecrated by Hong Kong businessmen. For years, however, newspaper owners formed a cartel and acted jointly to determine the market price of their newspapers. It was not until tycoon Jimmy Lai started Apple Daily that competition in the industry ran berserk and the cartel collapsed. One of the strategies was to race to lower selling prices, and the result was the closure of some newspapers just before Christmas last year.

Many people favour price competition because the market can fully operate under the principle of the survival of the fittest. Yes, this is true for commercial products. But the question is: Are newspapers merely commercial, profit-making businesses? Is there any unfavourable effect of the price wars that might outweigh the huge profits of the “winners”?

The answer is easy. According to statistics from the 1994/95 Annual Report of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, the median monthly salary for fresh graduates entering the mass media was $9,962, only about one-half the starting salary of social workers and teachers. Not only was the salary of young reporters the lowest of all career fields, but it also experienced the lowest percentage increase over the previous year — a mere 4.5 percent, or almost half the rate of inflation.

The data suggest journalists are being underpaid, and they are being paid even less with every passing year.

This low esteem that journalists are held in may seem to be unrelated to the price war. However, every day, those engaged in the price war threw thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars away in order to beat the competition. Shouldn’t newspaper tycoons invest this kind of money into enhancing the working conditions of journalists, so that more qualified and senior journalists will be attracted to remain in the industry? This would make newspapers better in quality — and this, in turn, is beneficial to society.

Meanwhile, it is not very wise for the government to intervene because a newspaper is more than a commercial product. Instead, it is a very important public tool and therefore should be free of any kind of government intervention. For the sake of would-be unemployed, poorly treated journalists and also the public interest, newspaper owners should be self-disciplined enough to stop the price war, which does more harm than good to the general public.