Thomas Jefferson, the third US president and the man who wrote the US Declaration of Independence, had it right when it came to the freedom of the press.
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter,” Jefferson wrote to Edward Carrington, a Continental Congress delegate from Virginia in 1787, as the Founding Fathers were finalizing the structure of the American democracy.
With ideas like that, I would venture to say that Jefferson would be rolling over in his grave if he could witness what the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government and President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration are doing to press freedom.
With the recent publication of the Freedom House report on global press freedoms, the world has now been let in on a reality that the people of Taiwan have known about for the past year — that because of the KMT assault on the media, until recently the freest press in Asia, press freedom is in serious decline.
Here in Washington, Ma’s clear disdain for the press is having a poisoning impact on what had been, under former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) government, a cordial, symbiotic relationship between reporters and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office.
In the eight years of Chen Shui-bian’s administration, KMT-reared representatives C.J. Chen (程建人) and David Lee (李大維), and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) representative Joseph Wu (吳昭燮), held regular monthly press briefings with the Taiwanese Washington press corps that were open, on the record and no holds barred. They were in the form of “tea parties” and combined comradery and hard-nose question-and-answer sessions.
The point was that through the conversations, the people of Taiwan were kept informed about Washington’s policy and events and both sides developed relationships that helped in the media’s daily newsgathering.
Now, things are completely different under Representative Jason Yuan (袁健生), a long-time deep-blue partisan, who succeeded Wu last summer.
When Yuan did hold press briefings, they were largely or completely off the record, denying the press corps the right to report the facts back to Taiwan. The only reporter who did get stories from Yuan was Norman Fu (傅建中), a diehard KMT supporter who was the China Times correspondent in Washington for decades, and now lives in the area in retirement. Fu and Yuan are old buddies from their days in the KMT fold. The stories Yuan leaked to Fu were critical of the DPP or its leaders.
One Fu story from Yuan was so disrespectful of the other Taiwanese reporters that the press corps staged a boycott against Yuan in an incident whose bad feelings have not yet healed.
The Taipei Times was long blocked from attending the press briefings, on the pretext that the sessions were held in Chinese and the newspaper was in English. This despite the fact that Taipei Times has long had two Taiwanese interns perfectly capable and willing to translate for me everything said at the briefings.
Yuan compounded that affront recently by falsely claiming that American Institute in Taiwan chairman Raymond Burghardt complained to him about being repeatedly misquoted by the Taipei Times, an allegation roundly denied by Burghardt.
Since last October, Yuan has imposed a virtual news blackout, steadfastly refusing to meet the Washington press corps by jettisoning the monthly tea party tradition, which was established in a bipartisan fashion by his predecessors.
Meanwhile, the Central News Agency is being decimated with the return to Taiwan of one of its two reporters here at the end of the month. The office has traditionally fielded a staff of two or three.
The Washington office has been warned by CNA bosses in Taipei to promote Ma’s policies and play up stories about Washington personae who praise Ma’s actions. In addition, they are reminded to skip or downplay any story that criticizes China.
It would do Taiwan’s freedom and democracy well if the KMT and Yuan were to bone up on their Jefferson.
“The only security of all is a free press,” Jefferson wrote. “The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.”
Or: “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”
Taiwan’s democracy is too valuable and hard-fought to allow the KMT to pervert it now.
Charles Snyder is the former Washington correspondent for the Taipei Times.
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase
RSS