As Mark Garlinghouse, vice president for Asia Pacific at Thomson Scientific, said: “The Scientific business of Thomson Reuters has long been a recognized information partner of top Chinese universities and government institutes such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China’s largest government research institute … We also provide patent, scientific and technical information to … well-known Chinese companies.”
This is just one example among many of media companies diversifying their business and entering lucrative marketss with both the private and government sector in China. As incentives increase, and with the promise of lucrative contracts with the cash-heavy Chinese authorities always in the background, it is likely that pressure — subliminal or as the result of direct external persuasion — will eventually build for those companies to “adjust” the information they provide in their news coverage so that it dovetails with their business interests. Time Warner’s ownership of CNN, Disney’s ownership of ABC and General Electric’s ownership of NBC are all examples of conglomerates imposing added business pressures on news organizations.
It is quite possible that portraying the KMT-CCP dyad in a favorable light — at least on the financial front — while painting the DPP in negative terms is the latest iteration of this phenomenon.
As long as big business, MNCs and their financial backers see the DPP as a “destabilizing” threat to Taiwan Strait economic integration, we can expect that the media conglomerates that are increasingly beholden to (if not part of) those giant, multifaceted corporations will continue to disparage the DPP and favor the KMT via stock market analysis.
J. Michael Cole is a writer based in Taipei.
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