While her close ties to the foreign community and its diplomatic corps gave Kao a rare insight into how the world viewed Taiwan in the mid to late 1970s, they by no means prepared her for the events of December 15, 1978 -- the day US President Jimmy Carter announced that the US would cut diplomatic ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing.
"We knew it was going to take place but didn't know the formula, and there had been no official response to any questions we asked," she said. "It was obviously inevitable, but the timing was a surprise to everyone."
The nation may have been politically neglected by the US and dwarfed by China from that day forth, but Kao believes that Taiwan's long-running outsider status shouldn't be mirrored by the mass media. The insular manner in which the nation's cable television news networks handle news is, according to Kao, harmful to both Taiwan's populace as well as to the nation's standing on the global stage.
"People in Taiwan talk about internationalization and globalization, but they certainly don't feel connected to these statements," she said. "The lack of coverage of and information about global events has meant that [Taiwan] is very inward-looking. The furthest people will look is China."
According Kao, when there are no hugely popular look-who's-sleeping-with-who stories topping the hourly news bulletins, Taiwanese news viewers' second choice is to tune into news about China, followed by Japan. US news comes in a distant third and if you're wondering about Europe or the Middle East, well, you'd best forget about it as Kao says neither is considered very newsworthy.
"So many Taiwanese tourists travel to Italy, but if you asked them who the prime minister is they wouldn't know, and the number of those who know who Yasser Arafat was, well, I'd have to say that probably 99.9 percent of people you asked on the street wouldn't know who he was," said Kao.
Since taking up her position at ETTV Kao has attempted to alter the news format by including more international news in bulletins. She will readily admit, however, that such a move could be considered somewhat of a mission impossible.
In the ongoing cable TV news wars, altering current formats to suit Taiwan's minority of more globally minded viewers is tantamount to committing suicide. Ratings rule and global news, it appears, just doesn't cut it with local viewers.
"We do minute-by-minute analysis of our news broadcasts, and at 1:15pm recently we noted that our ratings went down compared to other channels simply because we were broadcasting a speech by US President George W. Bush. People turned away and changed channel," said Kao. "International news is a killer for ratings."
While critical of cable television news networks, including her own, for their lack of coverage of international news, Kao has great admiration for CTi (
"CTi has been much bolder than other networks in the way it has chosen to adopt international news. Sure, ratings dropped for the first six months, but they have bounced back," she said. "This is something that I'm always trying to tell my [boss]."
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