Media owners are obligated to equip their business reporters with the skills needed to accurately cover issues, a journalism professor said yesterday.
"The media should have the right to monitor conglomerates, but the question is, are reporters equipped to do so? Can they read financial statements?" said Kuang Chung-hsiang (
Kuang made the remark in a panel held by the Association of Taiwan Journalists (the ATJ) on the interactions between the media and the corporate world in today's society, in the wake of a recent tangle between a local business reporter and corporate giant.
In a story published in the Chinese-language Commercial Times in April, business reporter Joyce Kung (曠文琪) revealed Hon Hai Precision Industry Co's (鴻海精密)'s quotes for connectors. The company said the story damaged its business strategy and claimed that it would cost the company NT$30 million.
Hon Hai, Taiwan's largest electronics firm by sales, in May sought a court order to freeze Kung's personal assets as part of a compensation claim of NT$30 million.
The injunction imposed on Kung was reported in a Chinese-language business weekly in July. Upon seeing the report, the ATJ initiated a petition with a target of 10,000 signatures to pressure the firm to drop the court order.
Hon Hai on Monday published a joint statement with Commercial Times in the newspaper, in which it agreed to withdraw the injunction and so end a freeze on the reporter's assets that had seen her salary cut by 33 percent per month since June.
In the statement, Commercial Times said it remained firm in its belief in objectivity and accuracy.
"A news report has to go through several rounds of editing before being published. It is rather puzzling that in Kung's incident, she was entirely isolated; the role of Commercial Times in this matter is worth examining," said Lu Shih-hsiang (
Lu pointed out that since there were no representatives from Hon Hai or Commercial Times on the panel, many facts could not be straightened out.
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
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
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