Program to keep a watch on media

Saying that Taiwanese people are increasingly dissatisfied with local media reporting, a new radio program was launched yesterday to teach people how to be smart listeners, viewers and readers who are able to analyze what they are are being told.

The man behind the program is Kuan Chung-hsiang (管中祥), a 30-something professor of journalism at Shih Hsin University.

"Many people detest the stuff fed to them by local media, but they don't know how to deal with it," said Kuan, the producer and initiator of the radio program WatchMedia," which made its debut Sunday on the GreenPeace Broadcasting Station.

"We would like to teach the audiences how to be smarter when they are watching the TV news or reading the newspaper," Kuan said.

In a poll conducted by the Broadcasting Development Fund regarding the performance of local TV news programs covering the SARS epidemic, nearly 45 percent of the respondents thought TV news reporting had "failed to be objective," while 63 percent of those surveyed thought that the media in Taiwan should be "better supervised."

"Taiwan media always offer the same thing, especially the TV news," said Jasmine Hsu (徐靜琦), a student reading for her MBA in Boston.

"There are always fighting and stereotyped stories. It's very annoying," Hsu said.

"The problem is, we have too many TV news stations," Kuan said.

"With the mainstream media's domination and commercial interests, it is very hard to read or watch the different programs with interesting topics in this country," he said.

A group of Internet surfers from KO-Media, a homepage for those not satisfied with the mainstream press in Taiwan, are planning a demonstration in September.

"There is no fairness and justice in the arena constructed by local TV stations," Kuan said.

"Take the Hualien County commissioner by-election for example: ETTV, the sponsor of the candidates' policy debate, didn't even invite Green Party candidate Chi Shu-ing (齊淑英)," he said.

In his program, Kuan tries to teach his audiences how to watch and read the news with a different viewpoint.

"One of our slogan's is: `WatchMedia, -- we try to lead you to a multi-dimensional world,'" he said.

"We don't want people listening to our program only to scold the local media, but we want them to know how to criticize the press with knowledge," Kuan said.

"In our program next week, we try to explore the relationship between local culture and Taiwan Thunder Fire, which was once the hottest TV drama series here," he said.

"But we don't want to make our programs sound like lectures. Instead, we will do the analysis over a piece of jazz or non-mainstream music," he said.