On Monday, veteran reporter Huang Je-bing (黃哲斌) resigned from the newspaper where he had worked for more than 16 years. If a journalist wants to quit his job, who is to stop him? Normally such an event would be no more remarkable than a rain shower.
However, Huang’s announcement of his resignation stirred up a big commotion only a day after he posted it on his blog, which registered nearly 100,000 visitors. The story was also quoted and reposted countless times. Why? Because Huang told the truth when few journalists would have dared to do so. Huang’s heartfelt explanation of why he resigned reads as follows: “Taiwanese newspapers are ahead of the world trend for paid promotional news. Since my ideas about this job seem outdated, I am resigning and going home.”
The first thing this media veteran did after quitting the service was to start a start up a petition against the practice of government at various levels spending public funds to get policies promoted in the news media.
Within one day, 1,078 groups and individuals had signed the petition. Among the signatures can be found the names of Taiwanese media studies department heads and professors. There are also media studies students worrying about their first job, media workers and many, many readers, viewers and listeners.
“How is this different from the communist system they have in China?” “Government manipulating the media … that’s really going too far.” “What’s the difference between the government buying media outlets and election candidates who pay for votes?” “When will I be able to stop having to guess what’s news and what’s advertising in the papers?” “If the media can’t survive without selling out, let them go to the wall! The way they’re going is a complete distortion of its reason for existence.” “I’ve been upset about this for a long time.” “Why do we need to sign for something to be done that should have been done long ago?”
These are just some of the great variety of comments people have posted along with their signatures. Some are puzzled, other angry, but what they have in common is a modest, but determined, voice demanding that news reporting should not be for sale.
Freedom of news reporting and a duty to monitor the government — these notions are the basic ABCs of the news. However, these concepts have long since given way to a cozy symbiosis between government, business and the media.
When government buys space or slots in the news, it is even more harmful than when business does it, because in doing so it gets a monopoly on the opportunity to talk about public policy, while shrinking the space for discussion of other viewpoints. That gives it influence over how people make political decisions. You can’t have a real democracy when people have the wool pulled over their eyes.
In some respects, political information may be considered beneficial to the public, and it is hard to prove that government has bought over the media. Probably for these reasons, while departments responsible for overseeing the media have in recent years imposed many fines for embedded marketing, the content in question is nearly always commercial product promotion, and there has never been a case of punishment for policy promotion by the government.
The heartfelt words of a veteran media worker have once again shown up the collective degenerate state of Taiwanese media and politics. This incident has once more exposed the difficult position in which media workers find themselves.
Once more it has provoked dissatisfaction among the reading and listening public, and once more it has shown the power of the Internet as a channel of communication. But how can this power be turned into a remedy that can make things better?
Apart from signing petitions, we need to call on the media’s conscience and press those in government to keep their promises. Let’s not forget that in 2008, during the campaign that led to their election as president and vice president, Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) signed a pledge to oppose embedded marketing. What has become of that promise now?
Perhaps the way to fix this problem for good would be to follow the example of the US, Canada and other countries by passing legislation that clearly prohibits governments at all levels from setting aside inappropriate budgets for buying over the media.
Hung Chen-ling is an assistant professor at the National Taiwan University Graduate Institute of Journalism.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
In a Facebook post on Wednesday last week, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) wrote: “The KMT must fall for Taiwan to improve.’ Allow me to ask the question again: Is this really true?” It matters not how many times Hsu asks the question, my answer will always be the same: “Yes, the KMT must be toppled for Taiwan to improve.” In the lengthy Facebook post, titled “What were those born in the 1980s guilty of?” Hsu harked back to the idealistic aspirations of the 2014 Sunflower movement before heaping opprobrium on the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP)
Some people are saying the weather has been wonderful this year. That depends on how one defines wonderful weather. The Ministry of Economic Affairs last week announced that the alert level for Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Miaoli and Taichung areas are to be raised from green to yellow, and that water pressure is to be reduced at night. Few households with water tower storage facilities would have noticed any restrictions on their supply, but people concerned with the water situation have been aware for some time that the lack of typhoons this year, coupled with low rainfall, has meant that in the
Although China’s “reform and opening up” has become an empty slogan, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) still put on a show by touring southern China to mark the 40th anniversary of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone’s establishment. His motive was not to regain the international community’s trust, but to shore up his power in China. Externally, it was a response to diplomatic setbacks, and it even revealed his adventurist attitude of not being afraid to go to war. When former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) in 1992 conducted similar inspections, it was to suppress the “leftist wind” that was interfering with his
An increasing number of cafes and other businesses in Taiwan are keeping animals, which draw in people who are seeking the next perfect shot for their Instagram accounts. In the past these were mostly standard house pets, such as cats and dogs, which are accustomed to living indoors and being around people. However, raccoons have become popular, as well as alpacas and other “unusual” animals that require specialty care and specific environments to thrive. In late June, a customer recorded a video of the owner of a coffee shop in Taipei apparently unleashing a border collie on a raccoon, who was the star
RSS