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Editorial: When the medium is the menace

Television viewers last Saturday witnessed violence committed by pan-blue demonstrators, who insanely attacked police officers maintaining order on Ketagalan Boulevard with slingshots and sticks and threw Molotov cocktails, fire extinguishers and rocks. Journalists documenting the event also fell victim to the crowd's brutality. Our law does not tolerate such barbarism. We urge judicial authorities to speed up their investigation so that the outlaws who commit-ted crimes that night can be put behind bars.

According to police accounts, dozens of citizens and law enforcement officers were injured that day, including a dozen photographers and reporters, some of them women. These brutal beatings startled television audiences. By yesterday, Taipei police had gathered concrete evidence showing that at least two protesters who encouraged other demonstrators to attack the police and journalists belong to organized crime groups.

In this light, we can see that some gangs had been waiting for an opportune moment to take action in order to benefit from the political turmoil. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Secretary-General Lin Feng-cheng (林豐正) even made a slanderous accusation that pan-green supporters mingled in the crowd and incited the violence. It is impossible for the people of Taiwan to accept such a trumped-up charge.

In retrospect, the disorder in the wake of the presidential election can be traced back to the Taiwanese media. News organizations did not act according to professional ethics, but instead reported inflated opinion polls conducted with specific political motives. On election day, in their competition for ratings, many TV news programs reported fraudulent vote figures showing that the pan-blue camp led by a large margin. The reported results were completely inconsistent with those reported by the Central Election Commission (中選會), which showed that the green camp won the election by a slim margin. In a few hours, the public, and especially pan-blue supporters who had believed these false media reports, went from self-confidence to surprised disappointment. It was therefore unavoidable that they would suspect the government of vote-rigging, without being able to see that the incident was the result of inflated figures reported by TV-stations.

In addition, KMT Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) are unwilling to accept their election failure. They have continued to arouse the emotions of people who are unaware of the truth, trying to take over the government by using this mass movement, as well as using the unstable political situation to consolidate their leadership within the KMT and the PFP. Thus, they have placed their personal political interests before those of the nation, and have marred the image of Taiwan's democratic achievements that many had come to admire.

Taiwan upholds not only democracy but also the rule of law. Election conflicts among different parties are not something new for us, but have been occurring ever since the implementation of local autonomy. Therefore, if Lien and Soong are not satisfied with the election results, they should seek a solution through the judicial system. That's what opposition leaders should do, rather than repeating untrue accusations. Nor should they attempt to force President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) government to violate the Constitution by establishing an independent investigation committee regarding the shootings. If the blue camp dares to deny the report made by forensics specialist Henry Lee (李昌鈺), nothing it says will be taken seriously by Taiwan's voters in the year-end legislative election.
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