Last week Formosa TV started a one-hour English news program. We wish FTV well in this project, but we cannot help thinking that the auguries are not on the TV company's side. In the last 10 years too many of these programs have launched and flopped to count. They have suffered from a toxic mixture of a lack of financial and editorial commitment on the part of the TV companies, abysmally low production standards, a lack of understanding as to who, if anyone, might be the audience for such programs and a concomitant failure to know how to appeal to any audience there might be.
We do not seek to heap these criticisms on FTV's head. After all, it is early days. But it was hard not to take note of Government Information Office Director-General Lin Chia-lung's (
To achieve such an ambition it is of course necessary that the world get to know Taiwan for the right things: its liberal politics, its open society, its economic vitality. The problem is that in the past these kinds of news and cultural programs have only succeeded in getting Taiwan known for its shoddy production values, lack of professionalism and pidgin English.
One of the problems in such a situation is the chronic lack of understanding here in Taiwan of the media standards that are common to English-speaking Western countries. Of course we know there are differences in these countries' media cultures, but that is not the point.
Rather it is the formidable production quality that appears so effortless as to barely register -- but which is the result of massive attention to detail, a very great deal of experience and also listening to the complaints of a highly critical audience. We have too often seen something trumpeted as "up to international standards" here in Taiwan without any understanding of what those standards are, nor the requisite determination to reach them. The result is that the overarching impression of Taiwan that many foreigners get is quite negative; it is of a country where people can't be bothered to make the effort to get things right.
This lack of understanding of the outside world is not just confined to media organizations. It permeates almost every way in which Taiwan interfaces with the rest of the world, from the laughably incorrect instructions on packaging that come with "made in Taiwan" products to the utterly baffling recent attempts to put forward Taiwan's case for joining the UN. In the old Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) days, the media effort surrounding the UN bid was quite straightforward. The party simply bought large ads in the Washington Post and New York Times and tried to explain why Taiwan's exclusion from this international body of dubious utility was unfair.
This year the DPP government seems to have thought that the argument needs to be taken to "the people" -- who, for this purpose, are apparently those who use certain bus stops in New York City. Five bus stops have been adorned with posters emphasizing that China and Taiwan are different. But nobody has yet answered the most basic question about this campaign: How influential is winning the hearts and minds of New York bus travellers likely to be in overturning Resolution 2758?
Once again we see a laudable ambition which, because of a lack of understanding of the way the world works, doesn't mesh with its means of execution. It's all very well to let the world know more about Taiwan. But when is Taiwan going to learn more about the world?
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