The Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Corp (KRTC) scandal has raised a host of questions. Is TVBS a China-funded cable TV station? Did it violate any regulations? Did it evade paying taxes? What was former Presidential Office deputy secretary-general Chen Che-nan's (陳哲男) role in the scandal? And did the Presidential Office cover up Chen's misconduct?
These are all legal questions, and should not be resolved through political means. Nor can we dodge all the queries in the name of upholding press freedom.
The conflict between the media and politicians seems as absurd as baseball players, coaches and referees all engaged in a brawl. The media, an independent "Fourth Estate," aims to prevent the government, the legislature and the judiciary from abusing their rights.
Therefore, any political pressure on the media can be viewed as interfering with freedom of speech and the press, even if the government's concerns are totally legitimate. The recent spat between the Government Information Office (GIO) and TVBS has provided us with an opportunity to contemplate the relationship between the media and politics.
After nearly a year of haggling and political squabbles, the pan-blue-dominated legislature recently passed the Organic Law of the National Communications Committee (國家通訊傳播委肙會組織法), giving the opposition pan-blue camp the upper hand in the nation's media regulation. However, the passage of such a bill demonstrates how politics and the media come into play in the nation's democratic politics.
Although such a bill does not seem to concern most people, it will actually play a key role in press freedom, media policy, the development of mass communications, the information industry and the media industry, which is valued at hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
Although the bill was passed amid violent clashes between pan-green and pan-blue legislators after the third reading, the pan-green legislators are still planning to file for a constitutional interpretation of the bill. This indicates how controversial the bill has become. The debate over the bill was far from objective, and was rife with political trickery.
In the previous legislative session, the pan-blue camp requested that the members of the commission should be determined by the number of seats that each party holds in the legislature. The Executive Yuan argued that it should have the right to nominate all the members of the commission.
In the current legislative session, the pan-greens argued for the Executive Yuan to be allowed to nominate three commissioners, believing that this would allow the pan-green camp to nominate 10 commissioners out of a total of 18. But the pan-blues, refusing to accept only minority control, maintained that the members of the commission should be constituted according to the number of the seats that each party holds in the legislature.
Thus, a review committee composed of six pan-blue mem-bers and five pan-green members will be responsible for picking 13 commission members out of the 18 people recommended by the political parties.
The second-phase review committee is insignificant. No matter how the results of the vote turn out, the six pan-blue reviewers will vote for pan-blue nominees while the five pan-green reviewers will vote for pan-green nominees. As a result, the pan-blue camp will have a majority in the commission.
Now that the general public has become concerned about issues relating to the commission and TVBS, I believe political interests should withdraw from the media. Only by doing so can the media, which is an agent of the public and which supervises the government, be returned to its rightful owners: the people.
The establishment of the commission heralds the end to an independent media. For a brief time, there was hope that the media could be free of political or military control, after the bitter experience of the White Terror and party-imposed censorship. However, the commission is going to be a battleground for politicians. The prospects for the media are therefore bleak.
Dennis Peng is an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of Journalism at National Taiwan University and chief executive officer of Hakka TV.
TRANSLATED BY DANIEL CHENG
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