A year after its broadcast of the baseball matches of Taiwanese New York Yankees pitcher Wang Chien-min (
Screening Wang's matches is, of course, meeting public demand. In particular, PTS has been applauded by the baseball-loving public for its uninterrupted, commercial-free broadcasts. But one year on, PTS has made no progress in improving its coverage.
PTS' sportscasting problems are two-fold.
First, it ignores domestic professional and amateur sports and fails to bear responsibility for promoting domestic sporting culture.
Second, when approval was given for the Chinese Television System (CTS) to become a public corporation earlier this year, the government did not lay down a plan to guide the direction of sportscasting by public broadcasters. As a result, it missed its chance to receive profits from broadcasting US major league baseball. Nor did it take up the chance of coordinating the broadcast of sports programs on different television channels.
PTS limits its sports broadcasts to US major league baseball, especially the matches of Wang's New York Yankees. The reason for this selection is apparently insufficient funds and manpower.
The fact that fans can only watch US sports on the nation's public television network is ironic. The UK's BBC and Japan's NHK, for example, primarily broadcast domestic sports events or international events in which their national teams take part. The main point is to develop local sports culture.
Shifting the focus from the US to Taiwan is a key responsibility for PTS in its sportscasting. If PTS cannot afford the skyrocketing costs of broadcasting local sports, it can begin by showing some less popular amateur events. In this way, PTS will show the public the performances of local athletes and help local sports culture take root, while inculcating experience among its sports unit.
BBC and NHK have their own methods to support grassroots sports. Perhaps PTS could learn from NHK's broadcasting of the Koshien high-school baseball tournaments and show local amateur baseball games. It could also learn from the BBC by setting up a sports section on its Web site that covers news and upcoming events.
With an increased budget and developing talent, the station could learn from foreign public television stations and work to get the broadcasting rights to major domestic and international tournaments while offering free or less commercially polluted sports programming.
In planning its coverage of the US major league for a second year, PTS has failed to improve on its hasty method used in last year's broadcasts, when it did not sign a contract until the last minute.
According to the Public Television Law (
More importantly, only by thinking as a multi-channel group can PTS give full play to its goal of promoting cultural diversity. Last year, PTS canceled the premier of a highly praised documentary film entitled Monkey War and Peace to broadcast one of Wang's games, when both could have been screened with a little more coordination.
The public broadcasting group already has two terrestrial television stations. It is considered more appropriate to broadcast US major league baseball on CTS, which has a larger audience.
Yet the BBC's arrangement of sports and other programming across different stations to avoid clashes could serve as a lesson for PTS in its deliberations on audience size and channel selection.
During its broadcasting of US major league baseball, PTS repeatedly screens its promotional video of Wang as the "pride of the Taiwanese people."
This is a warning sign, because the video only focuses on a single baseball icon. As part of a non-profit broadcasting group for the entire nation, it should move its focus away from individual stars to local sports culture and other expressions of cultural diversity.
This is not only the hope of baseball fans, but also the reason why this nation supported the establishment of a public broadcasting group in the first place.
Chad Liu is an associate professor in the Department of Communications at National Chung Cheng University. Wei Ti is an associate professor in the Department of Mass Communications at Tamkang University.
Translated by Lin Ya-ti and Eddy Chang
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