In the wake of the Tai Po fire disaster, international media have seized a narrative of “authoritarian control”, of critics “rounded up” and “silenced”, of a “cover-up of criminal proportions”.

The New York Times has led the pack with a series of blatantly false stories about Hong Kong that should frankly see the newspaper’s non-Hong Kong staff ejected with canceled visas en masse.

After Deadly Fire, Hong Kong Ominously Warns Grieving Citizens to Stay in Line, one of the New York Times’ headlines read. “In a sign of China’s role in the city, officials have tried to stamp out calls for accountability over a catastrophe that killed at least 159 people.”

For those of us on the ground in Hong Kong, such lies are easily countered.

Nobody is trying to stamp anything out.

The government’s daily “fire update” press releases could be compiled into a disaster management casebook, with authorities leaving no stone unturned: from housing and compensation to mortuary arrangements, from books of condolences to the handling of estranged pets, from arrests and manslaughter charges against contractors linked to fire safety issues, to the promise of deep independent investigations and reform. The government even took steps to make sure the afflicted could still vote in Sunday’s Legislative Council elections — a thoughtful act twisted by some as an “election turnout” conspiracy.

The idea that critics have been “silenced” is absurd and insulting to the many voices working for justice and reform as a result of this horrific tragedy. Indeed, the only “cover-up” here might be the international media hiding the truth about the aftermath of Hong Kong’s tragedy from the wider world.

Nobody arguing in good faith has been “silenced”. Many, from top officials to people in the street, are publicly critical of factors leading up to the disaster. Journalists, from small potatoes like me to top investigative reporters at major outlets, are digging into contracts, safety manuals and networks of contractors, and interviewing the survivors for tales of “systemic failures” in fire safety.

I spent the first Saturday of the fire at a government department with evidence of forged safety certificates, evidence I had found by rooting around the base of a rickety bamboo structure in one of Hong Kong’s densest urban streets.

We saw many such disgraceful attempts to politicize the tragedy while the flames still spread; we now see many of the activists and international media outlets for exactly what they are. Anybody fooled by mock displays of grief from these activists has no business being in journalism

Nobody told me to stop investigating or to keep the complaints quiet. Quite the opposite. My articles from 2024 pointing out deficiencies in the Buildings Department’s Mandatory Building Inspection Scheme and fire safety enforcements were revived and shared widely. And I can say here and now, without any fear of arrest, that the culture of building and workplace safety in Hong Kong needs massive reform, with many obvious faults exposed long before the Tai Po tragedy. In my opinion and experience of fires in Hong Kong, no matter where the investigations go, senior officials in the Buildings and Labour departments need to be seriously considering their positions.

But I am just one of thousands of people raising issues on this, one of millions praying for justice.

With at least 160 dead, nobody will remain silent or follow orders to “cover up” systemic failures.

So why is the international media pushing a cover-up narrative that critics have been silenced? Is it projection? To make such a claim, repeatedly and without shame, requires a willful misunderstanding of the situation on the ground in Hong Kong.

Granted, a few outlets are relying on overseas writers. Many BBC reports are filed from Singapore, while the BBC also relies on self-exiled Hong Kong “diaspora” journalists whose views on Hong Kong are unrecognizable to those who live here.

The narrative emblazoned across the New York Times coalesced from an obviously planted seed: The arrest of an activist who attempted to reignite the playbook of the 2019 warfare.

It’s a well-known strategy and the media loves it. When a terror group attacked a British Royal Air Force base, for example, The Guardian’s sister newspaper, The Observer, ran a full-page cover photo of one of the alleged attackers — a soft-focus portrait of a young woman with flowers in her hair against the stark headline: Terrorist. The same outlet was silent when details of the incident emerged in court, including of a vicious sledgehammer attack on a fallen police officer.

We’ve seen exactly the same playbook in Hong Kong. The first arrested activist is described, unilaterally, as a “young student”, conjuring up a naive but well-meaning 18-year-old, perhaps, not of the 24-year-old convicted criminal he turned out to be (and which no international media outlet has reported).

The language of the activist’s “four demands” was clearly deliberate — to sound as harmless to international audiences as that soft-focused image of the young woman, but standing out as a sledgehammer-wielding terrorist to those who survived 2019’s bloody “five demands” attacks.

In shouting the slogans of the 2019 riots in public, the activist’s arrest was inevitable, as the activist or his funders must have counted on. The narrative then found its track as the dogs picked up the scent in the air; buoyed by media-savvy nongovernmental organizations and activists around the world, international media condemned the poor student’s arrest.

Appalled by the “heartless” politicizing of the fatal fire, the Chinese government responded, eventually, by summoning the international media to put the record straight. This in itself became the story, with the tragedy of the fire now twisted and unrecognizable to anyone caring for the victims or working to dig into the truths behind the blaze.

One protester in exile, a former district councilor involved in a “Hong Kong Parliament”-style movement in Japan, attended a number of memorial services in Tokyo and other Japanese cities, replete with little LED candles and black ribbons. The events attracted numerous anti-China sentiments expressed in social posts by the attendees and was clearly an opportunistic attempt to expand the “parliament-in-exile” movement funded by foreign NGOs.

We saw many such disgraceful attempts to politicize the tragedy while the flames still spread; we now see many of the activists and international media outlets for exactly what they are. Anybody fooled by mock displays of grief from these activists has no business being in journalism.

The author is a Hong Kong-based journalist and sustainability researcher, and a permanent resident of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.