A series of public opinion polls conducted in the run-up to the 2000 US presidential election showed that nearly half of those aged between 18 and 29 acquired their election-related information from late-night TV talk shows.
Well-known talk show hosts -- such as David Letterman, Jay Leno and Oprah Winfrey -- are more trusted by these young people than old-fashioned anchors such as Dan Rather.
Although people like Letterman are old enough to be the young viewer's grandparents, the viewership ratings for their programs have remained strong and the content of each show closely follows news events. Their talent for making gags is beyond doubt, and their skills in political analysis are just as good as those of political columnists.
More importantly, the viewers of these shows span all gender and age groups, which is why politicians fall over each other to appear on them. News about presidential candidates George W. Bush and, before him, Bill Clinton, cracking jokes on these programs gained more media coverage than the campaign platforms.
But presidential elections are serious news, while talk shows are light entertainment. A clear line should be drawn between news and entertainment. Presidential candidates try to relax on these talk shows and join in the frivolity, while program hosts become political journalists, all of which blurs the line between news and entertainment. The result is that entertainment generates news and vice versa. News values have been redefined.
Despite this concern that the line between news and entertainment has become blurred, those who cherish traditional news values realize that this is an unstoppable trend. Since talk shows with high ratings can attract voters, it's difficult for candidates to ignore them.
But no matter how hard American TV stations try to blur the line between news and entertainment and how eagerly US politicians scramble to get on talk shows to secure votes and promote themselves, they will stop short of the "embedded marketing" of politicians in TV dramas.
Indeed, if TV station bosses in the US were to be so greedy that they started to allow politicians to appear in highly rated dramas or light entertainment series, such as Sex and the City or Ally McBeal in a bid to raise profits, they would simply make laughing stocks of themselves. Politicians who dared to make requests for such appearances would be roundly ridiculed as psychos.
Alas, what is inconceivable in the US is eminently conceivable in Taiwan. If the ingenious officials of the Government Information Office continue to insist on practicing "embedded marketing," they'll make themselves the laughing stock of the international community and acquire a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records to boot.
Wang Chien-chuang is president of The Journalist magazine.
Translated by Jackie Lin
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past