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Fund says TV stations are the losers

The Broadcasting Development Fund yesterday held a seminar to discuss television news stations exaggerating ballot count figures on the day of the presidential election. Academics and media analysts agreed that the media had lost much of the public's trust due to its coverage of the election.

Chen Ching-ho (陳清河), a professor at National Chengchi University, Dennis Peng (彭文正), associate professor at the Graduate Institute of Journalism at National Taiwan University, Taiwan Marketing Research President Huang He (黃河) and senior media figure Yang Hsien-hung (楊憲宏) were among those who took part in the discussion, while Connie Lin (林育卉), the CEO of the fund, hosted the event.

"The media has gone overboard with its so-called `ballot count reports' on the day of the election and therefore has lost a lot of its public integrity," Chen said.

Chen and others at the seminar pointed out that they, who were all involved in the media business, were doubtful about the ballot count figures they saw on television as every news station had numbers that differed greatly from those offered by the election authority, the Central Election Commission (CEC).

"I was invited to comment on the latest ballot count reports by a television news station. As I looked at all the television screens showing live `ballot count reports' by various stations, I couldn't help but feel lost as there were glaring discrepancies between the numbers offered by different news stations," Yang said.

The fund has recorded the ballot counts broadcast by 10 commercial news stations between 4:20pm and 9:16pm on the day of the election, which clearly illustrated that the numbers were updated much faster than those updated by the CEC. For instance, at 4:45pm, while the CEC only had approximately 180,000 as its official ballot count number, television stations already reported over 10 million ballots counted.

Huang provided an explanation of how news stations arrived at their numbers.

"It is very likely that news stations based their figures on election polls. These figures were supposed to be called `ballot count estimates.' By naming the updates of numbers `ballot count reports,' it became an act of deception aimed at attracting viewers," Huang said.

Peng said that since many of the news stations had consistently shown that the pan-blue camp candidates received many more votes than the pan-green camp, some blue camp supporters might not have been able to agree with the official result of the ballot count provided by the CEC.

"Many supporters experienced extreme mood changes due to the drastic discrepancies between the ballot count figures provided by the media at the beginning and the end of the counting process. It could be compared to a cancer patient being told that he had suffered from cancer at one point, and next that he was in perfect health," Peng said.
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