The National Communications Commission has fined five cable TV operators owned by Taiwan Fixed Network NT$100,000 each and demanded that these stations dispose of any holding by the Taipei City Government within one year.
Some thought the commission’s decision was unfair because it fined the stations instead of issuing a warning and asking them to make the changes, while others questioned the decision to give the offending stations a one-year grace period.
However, the unspoken consensus seems to be that the commission fined the cable stations to downplay the image that it was catering to big business with its proposal to relax restrictions on the government, political parties and the military holding shares in media companies.
What we should pay attention to is the commission’s impatience in fining those cable TV operators. Could it be that the commission’s announcement that it intends to amend the clause regulating political party, government and military holdings in media companies has attracted too much attention and it wanted to balance public opinion of the body to ensure passage of the amendment?
I support the changes that the commission proposed on Nov. 9, not because I have personally been affected by restrictions caused by outdated laws in the past, but because I am worried that the opportunities for mass media development will continue to be restricted if the legal clause pertaining to political parties, the government and the military investing in media companies remain unchanged.
So what is the problem? It is concern that those with money have the power to control public opinion — especially political opinion. In the past, when media resources were limited, the prospect of the confluence of money and power, of a single party and the military, arouses concerns over political intervention and the risk that only one voice would be heard.
However, now that we are flooded by information across all forms of media, the power of community interaction has become stronger than that of traditional media.
For example, the amount of attention Daisy Hung’s (洪蘭) comments generated has nothing to do with the market share of the magazines in which her articles appeared. (Editor’s Note: Hung, a professor at National Central University, caused an uproar with her criticism of medical students at the nation’s top university.)
Furthermore, if the status of investors had such a big influence, US private equity funds — which control 60 percent of Taiwan’s cable television market — should have been able to use their media clout to erase local fears about US beef. However, recent events have taught us that money cannot buy public opinion.
At the same time, we have seen MySpace, with its abundant funds, better service quality and content, lose miserably to the more user-friendly and interactive Facebook. We have also seen Facebook upset many business leaders because popularity of its Happy Farm game has affected productivity among workers. This tells us that the system can no longer control interaction between individual groups, which are now more influential.
Media have also become increasingly personalized and we cannot make predictions about future media trends using the standards and ideas of traditional media. We cannot forecast how well a business will do or what sort of market effect it will have based on the size of its funds alone. It is therefore outdated and useless to constantly view things in terms of who has invested in a particular company and how much money they have invested. It is also outdated and useless to use the same standards to try and regulate different media types.
If worries remain, individual investors could be restricted from investing in certain media functions or media companies. We cannot amend the law based only on capital ratios, as accountants can always find ways to get around such restrictions and this would only cause the public to lose confidence in the government’s investigative abilities.
Political parties, the government and the military nowadays really do not have that much money to pump directly into the media to influence public opinion. I believe we should encourage the willingness of authorities to amend outdated laws. We should also encourage the injection of more funds into the rapidly expanding media industry and welcome the cultural wealth it could produce. These are big steps toward digital convergence and we should welcome these changes.
Hochen Tan is chairman of the Taiwan Ecological Engineering Development Foundation.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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