By all accounts, except the government's, this experiment has not been a notable success for anybody but Richard Li and his company, now known as PCCW. In exchange for luring 33 companies, many of them merely from other parts of Hong Kong, to Telegraph Bay, Li was allowed to develop a major portion of Cyberport into an extremely lucrative housing scheme.

Seven years after that decision, with public irritation rising over a new scheme to hand over even more valuable land in West Kowloon to a single developer, the government has now chosen to try to defend its decision to give Cyberport to Richard Li.

The Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology, John Tsang, was to defend that decision on Wednesday. But before doing so, Tsang sought to prime the press and the public with the government's version of how Cyberport came about. As can be imagined, in Tsang's prose, it was a solid decision, exhaustively thought out and executed, that ``transformed disused land at Telegraph Bay into a lively modern community, enhancing the value of its neighborhood and enriching the quality of life in Hong Kong'' while turning the territory into a regional information technology powerhouse.

This is the second time in two months the government has sought to deliver its version of questionable property decisions designed to put enormously valuable land into the hands of Hong Kong's oligarchs. The first came in early December, when top-level government officials including Chief Secretary for Administration Donald Tsang and home affairs chief Patrick Ho delivered an equally extraordinary six-part series justifying the government's potential decision to grant the West Kowloon development to a single developer.

As with Tsang's article, the government laid down conditions for Hong Kong's newspapers. They were told to run that six-part series without abridgement or comment or not run a single word of it. The Standard refused to run those articles, just as it refused to run Tsang's.

The government apparently does not understand that the very foundation of a free press, which is so essential to democracy, makes it inimical to even make such a request.

In a democracy, a free press stands as an interpreter of the government's decisions, not as a conduit for their justifications. It is crucial the press stand aside from government and report what government does and how it does it.

Society's voters cannot be present at the creation of their government's laws and decisions. It is the press' responsibility to report what is actually happening in the halls of power to which the individual has no access. That is vital for the security of the community itself.

Printing wholesale government justifications of momentous decisions on land use in Hong Kong, without soliciting reasoned and fair analysis of at the same time, is an abdication of a newspaper's responsibility. Hong Kong's may be an imperfect democracy, but it is a democracy nonetheless, and its press remains free. That is why The Standard refused to print John Tsang's 1,800 words of justification for Cyberport, and it is why we will refuse to the next time as well.

The government has enormous resources to get its message across, ranging from its army of civil servants to public service announcements on government-owned RTHK. But the government is crossing a dangerous line when it tries to dictate to Hong Kong's media what and under what conditions it can print government statements - statements, we should remind John Tsang and his staff, that are written using our and our readers's tax dollars.

If we get copies of similar articles from other sources besides the government, we analyze their justifications, ask knowledgeable sources for their opinions, and print them as news for our readers to consider, on our news pages, as we do every other story.

We would be happy to consider any pieces that the government submits as op-ed pieces, subject to normal editing procedures. Or we will be happy to print them as advertisements, clearly labeled as such, and paid for by the government. But we will not print them in our news pages, lest our readers get the impression that these ideas are presented as fact.

We would also request that other newspapers, having given the matter thought, join us in boycotting the government's attempts to insert its rationalizations into their news pages while squelching public comment.