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DPP legislators criticize NCC over sports ads

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators criticized the National Communications Com-mission (NCC) yesterday for what the legislators said was a plan to penalize local television stations for showing logos, pictures or names of corporate sponsors during professional basketball or baseball games.

The commission argued that some commercials should not be aired during sports games, but said the lawmakers had misunderstood its policy.

"This [penalty] would greatly suppress the desire of corporations to actively sponsor pro games and would eventually destroy the professional baseball league in Taiwan," lawmaker Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) said, adding that the local professional league had already suffered because of the gambling scandal.

It is common practice for major corporations to sponsor high-profile international games, including the Olympics, Hsiao said.

The commission's plan would be "against practice internationally," she said.

"The NCC members have never shown interest in sports and they control too many things," she said.

DPP legislator Hsueh Ling (薛凌) said that the commission's plan would force TV stations to try to cover logos, names and pictures of corporate sponsors with mosaic, which would make watching sports an experience similar to that of watching pornography.

In response, NCC spokesperson Howard Shyr (石世豪) said yesterday that he was glad to see that legislators were concerned about the future of Taiwan's professional sports while demonstrating a profound understanding of the close relationship between professional games and media.

Shyr, however, emphasized that both legislators had misunderstood the regulations. Shyr also said that contrary to the legislators' comments, he was a fan of both the US and Taiwanese baseball leagues.

"There has always been confusion when it comes to differentiating between advertisements and television programs," he said. "What we have done is to simply help inspectors by putting the informal examination standards established from past experiences down in black and white. We have no plan to overhaul the national advertisement policy at this point."

Shyr said the policy did not regulate advertisements that appear as part of the game, including corporate logos or names that appear on scoreboards, inside ballparks or on players' jerseys.

"What we are focusing on are those [advertisements] inserted in the middle of a game by channel operators at the post-production phase," he said.

"They [the advertisements] often seem intrusive, with some of them promoting products unrelated to sports," he said.

Shyr said the commission would not penalize channel operators as legislators had claimed.

Advertisements during sports games will be subject to normal regulations governing ads, he said, which means that channel operators will only be fined if their total number of ads exceeds the limit of advertising minutes each station is allowed per year.
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