The battlelines in the war to preserve Taiwan's indigenous culture will likely spread to the Internet and other electronic media, an Aboriginal writer said yesterday.
"It has been and will continue to be a hard-fought battle for indigenous people to gain access to mainstream media," said Yoshi Dagun, better known as Kung Wen-chi (
Kung made the comments yesterday during the launch party for a new book, in which Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
The 405-page book, Indigenous Peoples and the Press: A Study of Taiwan is written in English. The work is a modified version of Kung's 1997 doctoral thesis at Loughborough University in the UK.
The book is Kung's third publication. His first book, Let My People Know, was published in 1993. The second, Loyal to Indigenous Taste: Aboriginal Media, Culture and Politics, was published last year.
The new book focuses on three dimensions -- the representation of indigenous minorities in mainstream news stories, the efforts of indigenous people to gain access to the news media and Aborigines' struggles to establish an identity and ensure self-determination.
Kung chose seven Han Chinese-owned dailies and analyzed their coverage of indigenous issues between January and June in 1994.
His findings concluded that Aboriginal affairs were considered significant among the chosen newspapers, and that indigenous cultural and artistic activities received the most coverage.
The study also found that nearly 90 percent of the stories that reported on indigenous affairs were written by non-indigenous Han Chinese.
"The findings show that the problem with the mainstream Taiwanese newspapers' coverage of indigenous issues is not a lack of attention nor negative reporting, but the virtual absence of indigenous staff" being employed by the newspapers, Kung said.
Although the mainstream media have paid increasing attention to indigenous affairs, Kung said, indigenous voices remain marginalized because they are unable to access or own the tools of communication.
In 1995, Kung examined the content of mainstream newspapers' coverage of an Aboriginal ceremony called the Tsou Mayasvi.
He found that a few media outlets reported the story wrongly, covering the event as a harvest celebration, when it was actually a ritual to related to warfare.
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