The Taiwan High Court decision this week to uphold a 30-day jail sentence given to a blogger for criticizing a restaurant is a chilling reminder of how young the concept of free speech and a free press is in this country.
The court’s Taichung branch sentenced a woman to 30 days in detention and two years of probation, and ordered her to pay NT$200,000 in compensation to a beef noodle restaurant over a July 2008 blog post saying the food was “too salty,” the place had cockroaches and was unsanitary and that the owner was a “bully” because of parking issues. The restaurant owner sued the blogger for defamation. The case went to the High Court after the blogger appealed a 30-day detention order handed down by the Taichung District Court, which said her criticism had exceeded reasonable bounds.
While the High Court found the cockroach complaint to be factual, not slander, it said the blogger should not have criticized the restaurant’s food as too salty because she had only visited the restaurant once and eaten just one dish.
Leaving aside the question of whether anyone would want to return to a restaurant where you found the food inedible and the place unclean, to be more empirical, the blogger’s criticism of what she ate was subjective. She found it too salty. She did not say that there weren’t enough noodles, or the beef wasn’t cooked right or it did or did not have certain ingredients. Her crime boiled down to a question of taste. That is what critiquing is all about. It is also why people read blogs.
People would read restaurant reviews in traditional media — if there is such a thing in Taiwan. However, most of the articles about restaurants in the popular press are little more than dining guides that cite location, operating hours and menu options. The same void can be found in the worlds of film, theater, music, dance or literature. This is one reason blogs have become so popular.
This nation suffers from a lack of critical thinking and analysis that can be attributed to an education system that does not encourage independent thinking and debate, and to the scars left by the draconian laws of the Martial Law era. These impediments to impartial, reasoned analysis hamper everything from higher education to political debate and efforts to build a better civic society.
The Taichung restaurateur is not the first to sue a critic over a bad review; there have been cases filed in the US, Australia and elsewhere — though none carried the risk of a jail term. In 2004, the review of an Italian restaurant in Dallas led the owner to file suit, upset because the critic gave him four out of five stars, but then was scathing about the food. He said it was the contradictions between the star rating and criticism he found hard to swallow. In 2007, the Australian High Court found, on appeal, a bad critique and a low rating from a newspaper restaurant critic to be defamatory because it attacked the restaurant as a business. What was interesting about that case was that in the initial court case, the jury found that the review was not defamatory — it was the appeals court and high court judges who thought it was.
Which brings the issue of food (or art) criticism back where it belongs — with the public. A good review can make a restaurant, a production or an artist and a bad one can hurt, but that is the risk one must take when creating a dish, a dance or any other product that is offered for sale. People either read reviews or they don’t. They learn whose opinion they feel they can trust and whose they don’t.
The threat of a lawsuit over a review is chilling enough. The threat of a jail term is even more overwhelming and out of proportion to the alleged crime, especially where no overriding issue of public interest is involved.
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