Better coverage of kids urged

Civic groups yesterday released a study on the coverage of child and adolescent-related news and said that the media must be better regulated to ensure the quality of such news reports.

The Alliance of Children and Youth Welfare Groups, along with the media-monitoring group Media Watch, gathered and evaluated news reports on children and adolescents from local cable TV stations' evening news from August to November last year.

The groups chose six major stories on child abuse and other negative issues for evaluation in accordance with the Child and Juvenile Welfare Law (兒少法) and the Broadcasting and Television Law (廣電法).

The suicide of a Chien Kuo High School student, the suffocation of a child in a school bus and a boy who was repeatedly tattooed by his father and died were some of the news stories that were evaluated.

Yeh Ta-hua (葉大華), secretary-general of the Youth Rights Alliance, said that although the results showed minor improvements in the media's reporting of child abuse, news headlines were often still disturbing and had nothing to do with the actual news.

The disclosure of the young victims' names and private information in the news reports and poor electronic disguising of the victims' faces were recurring problems, Yeh said.

"Child-related news coverage is mainly negative like abuse, abandonment or death," she said. "You hardly ever see anything positive."

Yeh also said that the groups hoped for consistency in such news coverage, as the media sometimes abides by the regulations but often forgets when there are no periodic crackdowns.

The media should be self-disciplined when it comes to reporting child abuse, the groups said. It should not be a fight for the highest viewing rate or readership, they added.

Chen Kun-huang (陳坤皇), chief-secretary of the Child Welfare Bureau under the Ministry of the Interior, said that the initial shock following the death of a child is bad enough for the family and that the continuous media reportage exacerbates the pain.

While the media has stopped disclosing the young victims' names, it has continued to report revealing details about the victims' families and neighborhood, Chen said.

According to the children's welfare law, violators will be fined NT$30,000 (US$926) to NT$300,000, he added.

Jason Ho (何吉森), deputy director of the department of broadcasting affairs under the Government Information Office (GIO), said that a more comprehensive set of laws is needed, as the existing legislation only regulates the release of private information pertaining to the victim.

Ho echoed the call for the media to exercise more self-discipline, adding that the GIO has provided books on how the foreign media practices self-discipline and has distributed them to local media and civic groups.

Last year, the GIO issued a total of NT$14,535,000 (US$448,749) in fines for 67 media violations which included violation of the children's welfare law, Ho said.

Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬) said that since the evening news' targets are mainly adults, it would not be possible to produce a fully child-friendly news report.

However, the government is in need of better policies when it comes to regulating news content, Cheng said.

There should be a television channel dedicated to reporting news for children and adolescents, he added.