While mainstream media coverage of the Kaohsiung Incident 20 years ago presented a one-sided picture of the event, opposition activists said yesterday that unofficial publications had played a significant role in balancing the public's perceptions.
Speaking at a forum yesterday, critics and opposition figures said that the 38 years of martial law in Taiwan (1949 to 1987) had effectively muzzled the media, with coverage of the Kaohsiung Incident being the most obvious example of this.
"The mainstream media was full of negative accounts of the Incident, and that influenced the way it was understood by the public," said Yang Chao (楊照), a cultural critic. Showing slides of newspaper clippings from the time, Yang read aloud terms like "traitors" (叛徒), "hooligans" (流氓) and "strange disposition" (性格詭異) that appeared in press headlines describing participants in the Incident.
Wang Chien-chuang (王健壯), president of The Journalist (新新聞) magazine, said 20 years after the Incident it may seem "ridiculous and even incredible to read such news stories. But this is because the media environment then was quite different from what we have today."
It was not only through their negative coverage of the Incident that the major media of the time tried to influence its public perception, but also in their timing. The two major daily newspapers, the China Times and the United Daily News, delayed their coverage of the Incident, as well as other previous demonstrations staged by pro-democracy activists, Wang said. This, they thought, would help to dampen demand for news as it had become stale by the time it was released.
"The tang wai ("outside the party,"
Citing her own experience, Ping Lu (平路), a cultural critic who was studying in the US when the Incident occurred, agreed.
Although Chinese newspapers abroad covered the Incident, Ping and many others knew that "the reality of what had happened was not presented by the media controlled by the government nor by newspapers available abroad. We knew clearly that tang wai magazines were where we could get the real information, whereas the two dailies were full of false reports," she said. "These publications provided us with important intellectual nourishment in the 1970s."
Ping was not alone. DPP legislator Fan Hsun-lu (范巽綠) singled out for praise the Taiwan Political Review, a tang wai magazine she read for the first time in 1975, saying it had inspired her to devote herself to working for opposition publications.
Keeping these tang wai magazines going was a difficult task for their publishers, printing houses and interested readers, insiders said. Only the most dedicated could keep their spirits up. But survive -- and thrive -- they did.
"Under the KMT's heavy-handed control, dozens of tang wai magazines were banned. But they simply took turns appearing on the market. If one was shut down, we would open another one under a new name," Fan said.
She said printing houses willing to put out the magazines had crafted their own strategies to deal with the authorities.
"Some of their owners would agree to print extra copies that the intelligence agencies could confiscate, while at the same time printing enough copies for circulation through secret channels," Fan said.
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