Should we use legal means to keep journalists from violating the rights of others? This has been a subject of much recent debate and many are looking forward to a constitutional interpretation from the Council of Grand Justices.
The council already gave the answer 11 years ago in Constitutional Interpretation No. 509: “In light of protecting other fundamental rights such as personal reputation and privacy and public interests as well, the freedom of speech is not an absolute right but subject to reasonable statutory restraints imposed upon the communication media.”
Although 40 years ago the US Supreme Court determined that the New York Times had the right to publish the “Pentagon Papers,” which were only fully released last week, it was not because freedom of the press was valued over national security, but because the publication of the documents would not put the country in immediate and evident danger. At the time, the Times praised the court’s decision, calling it “a ringing victory for freedom under law,” showing that the newspaper itself did not think it could override the law.
Through the Criminal Code, the Child and Youth Welfare Act (兒童及少年福利法) and the Social Order Maintenance Act (社會秩序維護法), Taiwanese society has tried to deal with a media sector lacking self-control and to regulate it using legal and other restraints. In reality — whether they are producing fabricated reports, crime news reports or paparazzi photography — if journalists followed their professional ethics, they would not violate other people’s rights and even if they did do so occasionally, there would be potential for improvement if they could maintain a measure of self-discipline.
However, accurate and fair reporting remains rare. Not only is self-discipline not part of the mainstream of journalism, some media outlets have even made the violation of rights part of how they make a profit, and they still refuse to reform their ways and apologize even when a court rules against them.
When dealing with media outlets that refuse to recognize the need for self-regulation, the only other avenue open to civic groups and individuals working for children’s rights is to demand that media behavior be legally regulated.
As always, some media outlets rehash the cliches about how any kind of legal restrictions, including lawsuits, are evil tricks aimed at restricting press freedom. This may be a realistic portrayal of the media’s current almighty status, but the public has had enough of the chaos that comes from media outlets using the public’s “right to know” as an excuse for pursuing their own profits.
Faced with a media sector devoid of professional ethics that claims press freedom overrides all other concerns, we must not allow them to ignore both self-regulation and legal regulations.
Lu Shih-hsiang is an adviser to the Taipei Times.
TRANSLATED BY KATHERINE WeI
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
From the Iran war and nuclear weapons to tariffs and artificial intelligence, the agenda for this week’s Beijing summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is packed. Xi would almost certainly bring up Taiwan, if only to demonstrate his inflexibility on the matter. However, no one needs to meet with Xi face-to-face to understand his stance. A visit to the National Museum of China in Beijing — in particular, the “Road to Rejuvenation” exhibition, which chronicles the rise and rule of the Chinese Communist Party — might be even more revealing. Xi took the members
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on Friday used their legislative majority to push their version of a special defense budget bill to fund the purchase of US military equipment, with the combined spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.78 billion). The bill, which fell short of the Executive Yuan’s NT$1.25 trillion request, was passed by a 59-0 margin with 48 abstentions in the 113-seat legislature. KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), who reportedly met with TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) for a private meeting before holding a joint post-vote news conference, was said to have mobilized her
RSS