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Editorial: The NCC saga sinks into farce

Week by week, the National Communications Commission (NCC) is vindicating fears that its partisan membership would pay dividends for pan-blue-camp figures with media interests.

In recent months the NCC has made an ass of itself by lecturing or fining local and international media outlets on innocuous content errors. More than this, however, the NCC's membership has made it clear that it intends to micromanage media affairs in this country in a way that makes the Government Information Office's paternalistic style appear enlightened.

Now, the NCC has picked a genuinely political fight with the rest of the executive by approving the sale of the Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC) to four "front companies" -- in the words of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) critics -- allegedly owned by Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), a hardline pan-blue camp figure and minor media mogul.

Yesterday it was revealed that the NCC wrote to the National Security Bureau and other government agencies asking for analyses of the ramifications of the sale on national security. The NCC, it seems, would like other government agencies to do its work for it. The bureau and the other agencies declined, which is hardly surprising.

The bigger picture needs to be spelt out. We are not only criticizing individual decisions by the NCC or regressive elements in the pan-blue camp -- though there is certainly no shortage of them -- but arguing that the regulator for media and telecommunications should be distanced from the blue-green political divide as far as possible, and that it stop meddling in problems that are better addressed by the industry and the feedback of ordinary people.

Instead, we have a situation in which the sale of media properties to anyone with political connections results in the entire membership of the NCC suffering a conflict of interest.

In the unlikely event that the DPP wins a majority of seats in the next legislature, the NCC as it stands would then become a plaything for the pan-green camp. This would only continue to hurt the interests of the general public.

The NCC is, in effect, a partisan and punitive arm of the legislature rather than a body of independent experts appointed by the executive. It resembles nothing more than the para-legal kangaroo courts that "investigated" the assassination attempt on President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) on behalf of the pan-blue-camp legislative majority.

And nothing illustrates the infantile potential of this partisan morass better than the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) -- the current NCC membership's benefactor -- yesterday threatening to sue the government for hurting the NCC members' feelings.

When the Council of Grand Justices declared the NCC unconstitutional over its partisan membership selection process in July last year, the justices also confusingly gave the NCC a reprieve, allowing the body to continue functioning until the end of this year, by which time the law is supposed to be amended to meet the court's requirements.

That reprieve remains one of the council's strangest decisions in recent years, and its legacy may well be a round of wasteful litigation within the executive.

But if this farce alerts voters and more sensible politicians to the folly that comes with the creation of politically partisan government agencies, then some good may yet come of it.
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