The media environment in Taiwan is in a state of crisis, one that did not fully capture the public’s imagination until someone from deep inside said he’d had enough and resigned.
US-based Freedom House may have called it “one of the freest in Asia,” but Taiwanese media are under severe pressure and many indicators are pointing in the wrong direction. The signs were there, but it took reporter Huang Je-bing’s (黃哲斌) resignation from the China Times on Dec. 12, after 16 years of service, to draw attention to the severity of the problem and prompt fellow journalists into action.
The source of Huang’s discontent was the growing practice of government product placement in the media to promote its policies, which in effect constitutes the masquerading of propaganda as news.
The potential for abuse is self-evident, especially when we put it in the context of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration’s friendly attitude toward one of Asia’s worst offenders in terms of media freedom: China.
Though the practice has already been characterized as “rampant,” it can only intensify as the Ma government tries to sell more of its controversial cross-strait policies (as they are bound to emerge) to an increasingly skeptical Taiwanese audience.
Beyond Huang’s complaints are other equally worrying trends, all of which appear to be directly or indirectly related to Ma’s policy of engaging Beijing. Some media conglomerates with business interests in China, for example, have been good students of Beijing and are now applying the same kind of self--censorship that makes reporters’ lives there so difficult. Furthermore, unsubtle directives to state-owned media to tone down criticism of Ma’s administration added to growing evidence that political reporting is being discouraged to make room for business news, should give us pause (a quick glance at a Singaporean newspaper should be sufficient to highlight the shortcomings of politically sanitized publications operating in a “soft authoritarian” environment).
It gets worse. Laws that have been implemented or are being considered, such as the Computer-Processed Personal Data Protection Act (電腦處理個人資料保護法) and amendments to the Children and Youth Welfare Act (兒童及少年福利法), will make it increasingly difficult for reporters to access critical information on individuals or, for example, to describe scenes of violence. The first gives government agencies arbitrary authority to decide what kind of information can be released in “the public interest,” while the latter, though meant to protect children, can also unduly embellish reality and prevent key information from being made public.
In and of themselves, such measures could have a beneficial effect on society, but in the wrong hands, they could quickly turn into instruments of repression, just as nuclear energy can be used to provide electricity or annihilate cities.
All of this is occurring under the shadow of calls by senior Chinese officials for greater media cooperation across the Taiwan Strait, which, because of Beijing’s unyielding stance on freedom of expression, can only have a corrupting, if not chilling, effect on the media this side of the strait.
Before it’s too late, let us hope that more whistleblowers like Huang, people with integrity and a sense of civic responsibility — not just in the media, but also in academia and government — will sound the alarm. Reporters are not being rounded up or attacked like in Russia or China, but the muzzling effect, though subtle, exists nonetheless and is inexorably chipping away at citizens’ right to unfiltered and unaltered information.
Taiwan has lost Trump. Or so a former State Department official and lobbyist would have us believe. Writing for online outlet Domino Theory in an article titled “How Taiwan lost Trump,” Christian Whiton provides a litany of reasons that the William Lai (賴清德) and Donald Trump administrations have supposedly fallen out — and it’s all Lai’s fault. Although many of Whiton’s claims are misleading or ill-informed, the article is helpfully, if unintentionally, revealing of a key aspect of the MAGA worldview. Whiton complains of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s “inability to understand and relate to the New Right in America.” Many
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier this month raised its travel alert for China’s Guangdong Province to Level 2 “Alert,” advising travelers to take enhanced precautions amid a chikungunya outbreak in the region. More than 8,000 cases have been reported in the province since June. Chikungunya is caused by the chikungunya virus and transmitted to humans through bites from infected mosquitoes, most commonly Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. These species thrive in warm, humid climates and are also major vectors for dengue, Zika and yellow fever. The disease is characterized by high fever and severe, often incapacitating joint pain.
In nature, there is a group of insects known as parasitoid wasps. Their reproductive process differs entirely from that of ordinary wasps — the female lays her eggs inside or on the bodies of other insects, and, once hatched, the larvae feed on the host’s body. The larvae do not kill the host insect immediately; instead, they carefully avoid vital organs, allowing the host to stay alive until the larvae are fully mature. That living reservoir strategy ensures a stable and fresh source of nutrients for the larvae as they grow. However, the host’s death becomes only a matter of time. The resemblance
Most countries are commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II with condemnations of militarism and imperialism, and commemoration of the global catastrophe wrought by the war. On the other hand, China is to hold a military parade. According to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency, Beijing is conducting the military parade in Tiananmen Square on Sept. 3 to “mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.” However, during World War II, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had not yet been established. It
RSS