The DPP, seeking to honor its longtime pledge to free the media from political influence, said yesterday it will make fresh attempts to force party officials to abandon their stakes in media organizations.
But senior DPP lawmaker Trong Chai (
He said the government should first relinquish its stakes in two other terrestrial TV stations, Chinese Television System (CTV,
According to DPP Deputy Secretary-General Lee Ying-yuan (李應元), the party's Central Standing Committee will take up the issue of media reform in its meeting on Tuesday.
Lee said it has been one of the party's major planks to eliminate political influence from the media, especially terrestrial TV stations.
"The DPP has never abandoned this goal," he told reporters. "It was also a key promise of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in the 2000 campaign."
Last October, the Campaign for TV Democracy, a civic group, issued a condemnation of the DPP government for failing to take concrete steps to reform the media.
It suggested the Chen administration turn TTV, CTS and the Public Television Service into a public TV group and push for legal revisions that bar political parties and their members from owning or running media organizations.
Saying they understand the task is formidable and laborious, the activists called on the government to establish a timetable for reform.
Lee said the effort to make members divest their interests in media organizations was moving at too slow a pace.
Besides Chai, DPP lawmaker Chang Chun-hung (
Lee said he understood that the desire to break the monopoly of the electronic media by the former KMT administration prompted his DPP colleagues to run TV stations of their own.
By so doing, they hoped to better inform the people and end biased news reporting that played a crucial role in entrenching one-party rule, Lee said.
"It took Chai tremendous time and energy to establish Formosa TV in the hope that news reports in the nation would be more balanced and diversified," he said. "It is time to reconsider the strategy now that the media are no longer a government monopoly."
The KMT, though swept from power, has managed to maintain its dominance over the China Television Company (
Lee said the DPP will ask its lawmakers to push through broadcasting rules that obligate all political parties and their officials to release or sell their shares in broadcasting enterprises.
A bill toward that end passed its first reading in the previous legislative session. It proposes barring party officials from owning stakes in TV companies.
Later in the day, Chai told reporters the government should adopt an incremental approach to the matter to avoid what he called widespread political repercussions.
He contended it is more urgent for political parties to withdraw their capital from TV companies before steps may be taken to regulate individuals.
The government, if serious about regulating the media, should dispose of its CTS and TTV shares first, Chai said, adding that he has respected professionalism when running Formosa TV.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching