The Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) former radio station, the Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC,
In December 2005, it was sold to a subsidiary of the China Times Group (
We call on the National Communications Commission (NCC) to use its full authority to maintain the diversity of media ownership in the broadcasting industry and to protect the media's role as the fourth estate.
The KMT's deal with the China Times Group seems to be a shell game. If the group did not really buy the BCC, then the deal existed in name only and the KMT has violated the Radio and Television Act (廣電法). If the group did buy it, selling it within a year proves that it had no intention to operate it. This raises the question whether it was all a matter of using precious public resources to turn a profit.
According to Article 18 of the Act, a media ownership transfer should not be approved if the transferee is an enterprise and holds more than 50 percent of shares in a newspaper or terrestrial radio or television business, and 10 percent if the transferee is an individual. Such shares cannot be transferred to board directors, supervisors or managers of related media businesses.
The spirit of the Act is to avoid the creation of multimedia monopolies. Both deals were in violation of this.
Although Jaw resigned his post as president of UFO Radio in March, the ownership structure and the number of individual shares he holds is important to assess the legality of the case. Business owners usually refuse to answer such questions in the name of commercial privacy, or take advantage of legal loopholes through indirect investments to build a multimedia monopoly.
The transfer of the BCC is related to the withdrawal of political parties, the government and military forces from the media in Taiwan.
There are issues of multimedia management, share concentration and the role of foreign capital that are also important. The NCC acted passively and approved the China Times Group's takeover of the BCC in 2005. How can it now sit back and watch the case be repeated? It should examine the details of the deal.
We believe that the NCC should approach the case from two directions.
First, it must enforce restrictions on short-term transfers of media ownership. For example, the China Times Group should not be allowed to sell the BCC within a year of its purchase, or it should return the radio frequency to the government.
Second, the NCC must make available to the public the share holdings of media owners and critical business information. In order to win the public's trust, there should be no black-box operations.
Of course, we also understand that current laws and regulations are incomplete.
Faced with this, the NCC should immediately propose feasible amendments to the Act and share their professional knowledge with the Legislative Yuan to push the amendments through as soon as possible.
While handling the BCC issue several months ago, NCC members commented that the commission should revisit the issue some time in the future.
Now that this case is back in the limelight, the public has high expectations that media owners will be prohibited from cashing in on a public resource.
Hung Chen-ling is an assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of Journalism at National Taiwan University. Chad Liu is an assistant professor in the Department of Communications at National Chung Cheng University.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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