Last week Britain saw the career demise of two TV personalities. One was a BBC presenter, found guilty, at least in the public eye, of taking drugs and serial adultery. The other was an Independent Television morning entertainment show presenter whose cocaine habit and alleged treatment of women turned him from commenting on the news into being the news. Both cases were too hot for the companies which employed these two and they were sacked. TV personalities, according to the UK's minister for culture, serve as "role models" and the wayward antics of these gentlemen were simply not acceptable. And this in a country whose tabloid press is an international byword for scurrilousness.
Hong Kong, also not exactly known as the soberest of news environments, had an even more bizarre media incident. Eastweek, a gossip rag, ran a front-page cover featuring a decade-old picture of a well-known actress naked on the back seat of a car. She was not disporting herself but rather was the victim of a kidnap and the nude photos were taken by her kidnappers to torment her. Eastweek published the picture with her face blurred and breasts covered but nevertheless the kidnapping itself is so well remembered that even in Taiwan there is no doubt about who the actress was. Local entertainers, including movie legend Jackie Chan (
It is worth stressing once again that both these incidents happened in places with a raucous and super-competitive media culture. Yet there is a sense in which the behavior of both of media/entertainment organizations and those who are closely identified with them can be called to account for overstepping the mark. It should also be stressed that neither the BBC, ITV nor Emperor did what they did because the government ordered them to. Rather there was an understanding that a line had been crossed, the organizations had been brought into disrepute and something needed to be done to win back public respect.
Can anyone remember this happening in Taiwan? We can't. And yet the faults of Taiwan's media go far beyond wayward TV presenters and the bad taste of the tabloids. Of course, we have these as well. The recent scandal of Kelly Hsueh (
But this is hardly of the gravest concern in Taiwan. Here one can, as The Journalist did, accuse the president of being a philanderer and accuse the vice president of providing the information, lose a libel case over the claim and still hold that what was done was both correct and in the public interest. No admission of shame there. Some news organizations make almost a fetish of relating scandalous tittle tattle, which usually turns out to be false, about people in the government in pursuit of their own political agenda. When they are conclusively proved to be in the wrong do they ever apologize? Of course not. When they can be shown to have thrown away the scepticism over stories which good journalists imbibe with their mother's milk in pursuit of their political vendettas -- the United Daily News and early October's "ear licking" scandal being the most recent example -- does anyone apologize? Don't be absurd.
Let's face it, here in Taiwan "journalistic ethics" is an oxymoron. Tolstoy said that "Journalistic activity is an intellectual brothel from which there is no retreat." Certainly there has yet to be a retreat in Taiwan.
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