with the impending return of Hong Kong to China, the highly successful South China Morning Post is beginning to have its problems. There are grave concerns about the fate of Hong Kong's press after the Chinese take over in 1997.

According to a recent edition of Business Week, Beijing shows little tolerance for negative press coverage. China has been sending warnings by handing out stiff penalties to Hong Kong journalists who have fallen into their clutches.

One reporter for a Hong Kong paper received a 12-year prison sentence in 1994 for revealing such supposed state secrets as interest rate changes and international gold transactions.

There is speculation that political pressure has caused the lucrative South China Morning Post to kill the hard hitting comic strip, The World of Lily Wong, by American Larry Feign who spared no one from Bejing's autocrats to Hong Kong's governor. The excuse for cutting the strip is "cost-cutting'' despite the Post's great success.

Business Week's June 12 edition says, "The battle over freedom of the press and flows that is looming in Hong Kong will probably be played out in one form or another throughout the region. As Asia modernizes, demand is building for more accurate information and more accountable government. Wide-open access to information is also increasingly essential to business. But moves toward more liberty are threatening to authoritarian governments that worry about losing control.'' The Hong Kong situation indicates to us here in Bermuda just how delicate press freedom is. We all take it for granted and then one day realise that freedom is being eroded.

Threats against freedom of the media come from many sources, some blatant, others not so obvious. Poor economic performance is always a serious threat.

Today, much of Bermuda's media has an economic struggle.

Both broadcast companies are suffering badly and the Bermuda Sun is also very weak. That makes them vulnerable to threats to withold advertising, to advertisers who demand news coverage or to threats from pressure groups or politicians.

Unhappy with this newspaper's stand on the male homosexual bill, a number of churches removed their advertising. It was either an attempt to bring pressure to bear or to do a kind of "tit for tat'' but the churches may find what some companies have found in the past, their business suffers first.

A threat of legal action can be a detriment to freedom of the media simply because of the cash and the manhours it takes today to defend a legal action, no matter how fanciful.

Insufficient funds to operate proper newsrooms has caused the broadcast media to give up their freedom to report and lean heavily on lifting -- stealing might be a better word -- their news from this newspaper. That is not healthy for Bermuda because it limits the sources of news for the public.

Boycotts are a threat both to the public exposure and the profitability of the media. The Royal Gazette Ltd. took very seriously a boycott threat after the last election.

Here in Bermuda today we do not have to cope with the threats of China, however things are not so different. Pressured politicians are threatening the media. Their henchmen add lies to threats.