Netizens are casting doubt on recent reports that students were paid to take part in a protest against the takeover by Want Want China Times Group of the cable TV channels owned by service provider China Network Systems (CNS), saying the group most likely instigated the reports to attack the protesters.
On Friday, the Chinese-language China Times, China Times Weekly and local news channel CtiTV — all members of Want Want Group — ran stories with pictures showing student protesters taking money after a rally outside the National Communications Commission (NCC) building.
Although the media outlets provided no evidence to back up their claims, the three outlets reported that Academia Sinica research fellow Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) may have been involved in paying the students.
Huang had organized a separate demonstration at the same time as the student rally in front of the NCC building because the commission was reviewing the merger at that time. However, reports from the China Times, China Times Weekly and CtiTV did not differentiate between the two demonstrations.
Although Huang organized a press conference denying that he had any connection with the student protest, the media group continued to accuse him of “not wanting to clarify the incident,” while saying he was “not willing to disclose the truth.”
Yesterday, several media outlets, including the Chinese-language Apple Daily, claimed to have discovered the identity of a woman who handed out money to students on Wednesday.
The woman, identified as Liang Li-hui (梁麗惠), is an accountant at Chinsen Communications Co.
While reporters were unable to contact her, Liang’s colleagues said that although they did not know who had hired the company to recruit students, they were certain it was not Huang.
Netizens are increasingly voicing suspicions that Want Want Group may be behind the incident and using it as a way to stigmatize opponents of the takeover.
National Tsinghua University student Chen Wei-ting (陳為廷) posted a picture of the protest that was aired in a CtiTV report, with the China Times Weekly deputy editor-in-chief Lin Chao-hsin (林朝鑫) among the crowd, adding that he suspected Want Want was behind the protest.
Lin denied the accusations, saying he was at the protest because it was his job to report on it, while CTiTV threatened to file a slander lawsuit against Chen.
Want Want China Times Media Group employees accused the media giant of manipulating news reports to attack Huang.
“I feel like dying everyday,” a reporter told the Taipei Times on condition of anonymity. “My name is on news reports attacking Huang, and I’ve seen readers criticizing me for the reports on the Internet, but the fact is that I didn’t produce most of these reports.”
The employee said that his name and the names of several of his colleagues were on the byline of a news report published on Friday implying that Huang was behind the incident.
“In fact, 90 percent of the report came directly from the China Times Weekly and what I wrote was all deleted,” the reporter said. “I complained about this several times, but the management simply ignored me.”
The reporter said many employees within the group feel uncomfortable with what the company asks them to do, with one resigning because of it.
Huang released a statement yesterday, asking Want Want China Times to “stop destroying the dignity of journalists in the group.”
“What Want Want China Times has been doing proves how important it is to resist this media monster, which has no ethics in news reporting,” the statement said.
He also called on the media group to leave his family alone, as reporters from the group have not only been following him around for days, but have also stationed themselves around his house.
Huang said he would be leaving for the US for 10 months on a pre-scheduled research project next week, but added that the project was scheduled last year, and asked the media group to refrain from fabricating so-called news out of it.
He was referring to a report by CtiTV that Huang’s decision to leave Taiwan for so long right after the alleged scandal broke was “suspicious.”
NOVEMBER ELECTIONS: The KMT urged the CECC to exclude Taiwanese from the arrivals cap, as they would lose their right to vote if they could not return by July 26 The COVID-19-related border control measures and the cap on the number of international arrivals are not being eased, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday as it reported 112 imported cases of the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), who is CECC spokesperson, said a meeting was held yesterday morning in which the Cabinet decided that current border control measures would remain in place. He said the main considerations were global COVID-19 cases increasing 21 percent last week, imported cases of Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 continuing to be detected
TIMING: 'The CHIPS Act funding is crucial for us. In other words, if the act’s passage is delayed for too long, we will certainly need to adjust,’ chairwoman Doris Hsu said GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓) plans to start construction on a US$5 billion wafer fabrication facility in Texas in November, after passage of the US$52 billion Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act. The fab would be the largest of its kind in the US and one of the largest in the world, with a monthly capacity of 1.2 million wafers, GlobalWafers said, adding that the investment would be the first new fab in the US in more than 20 years and critical to closing a semiconductor supply chain gap. The world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier said the project, which
Samsung Electronics Co yesterday commenced mass production of 3-nanometer chips that are more powerful and efficient than predecessors, beating rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) to a key milestone in the race to build the most advanced chips in the world. South Korea’s largest company said in a statement that it was beginning with 3-nanometer semiconductors for high-performance and specialized low-power computing applications before expanding to mobile processors. By applying so-called Gate-All-Around transistor architecture, Samsung’s 3-nanometer products reduce power consumption by up to 45 percent and improve performance by 23 percent compared with 5-nanometer chips, it said. Samsung’s push to be first
Three to four tropical storms or typhoons are expected to hit Taiwan this year due to a weak La Nina effect in the northwest Pacific Ocean, the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) said yesterday, as typhoon season begins next month. Taiwan’s typhoon season generally lasts from July to September, with most typhoons occurring in August. Weather Forecast Center Director Lu Kuo-chen (呂國臣) told a news conference that a weakening La Nina is expected to have less of an effect on Taiwan. “The climate simulation we conducted, and those conducted by other meteorological agencies around the world, showed that the number of typhoons that
RSS