The Chinese Television System (CTS) said that its news programs would steer clear of gory, sexual and violent content as of yesterday.
The move reverses a firm trend in news coverage. Since the deregulation of cable TV more than a decade ago, sensational stories and images have gradually become the selling point of many TV news programs.
"CTS is the first television station to bring television news back to normal," said Lu Shih-hsiang (
During its evening news program yesterday, CTS announced its "Self-Discipline and Purification Declaration" (
"The morals of Taiwanese society have become degraded over the years. By issuing this declaration, we hope to provide untainted news programs to the audience," said Rick Chu (
The seven types of prohibited content are: patients receiving emergency medical treatment, the faces of crime suspects, car accidents, roadside alcohol breath tests, family disputes, crime scene simulations and superstitions -- such as people who claim to be possessed by spirits.
CTS has confidence that the move will not affect its ratings.
"What we are doing is segmenting the television news audience and our news programs are targeting viewers who want to watch news with ethical content," Chu said.
"We conducted a poll of viewers and found that the majority of those surveyed, especially residents in southern and central Taiwan, welcomed the return of `clean' television news programs," Chu said.
The station's aim is to professionalize and safeguard its media standards, he said.
Programming will include quality, in-depth reporting with a focus on political, economic and international news, as well as coverage of social issues, Chu said.
Lu, a former journalist and a long-term media observer, defined "normal news programming."
"Normal news should be ethical and professional. Unfortunately, due to the negative effect of competition among television news and the commercialism of the news industry, news has become sensationalized," Lu said.
"What CTS is doing is trying to direct the quality of news back to the way it is supposed to be," Lu said. "I hope CTS can live up to its own expectations."
Lu said sensational news obscures the truth.
"A common practice today is that a news station pre-determines what news topics they would like to produce and then for several days the station will repeatedly provide heavy coverage on unsubstantiated matters. After all the hubbub, the truth of the matter still remains unclear to the audience," Lu said.
Lu hoped the public would give CTS credit for its intention to broadcast ethical and professional news programs.
"It is encouraging to know that at least one station bothers to take up its responsibility and face its audience truthfully. I hope other media outlets, including print journalism, will follow suit," Lu said.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: