Western news outlets are increasingly turning to Chinese nationals sympathetic to the Chinese government for reporting in the region amid a sharp decline in the number of foreign journalists in Taiwan, industry figures said yesterday, adding that such developments are leading to either skewed coverage or little to no coverage at all of Taiwan by Western media.
A recent string of allegedly biased reports on Taiwan by such big-name Western media organizations as CNN, The Associated Press (AP) and the Economist have sparked an outcry from all quarters. That reporting was again attacked by media figures yesterday at a forum hosted by the Broadcasting Development Fund, a private media watchdog known for its pro-pan-green-camp views.
"Lee Ming [李閩] is Hong Kong Chinese," said fund director Connie Lin (
"Lee may have studied or even grown up in the US, but he obviously harbors biases in his reporting that favor Beijing," she said.
Lee's reporting underscores the consequences of a swelling legion of Chinese journalists in Western news outlets who churn out pro-Beijing articles, she added.
A Japanese national once blacklisted by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government while working as a Kyoto News reporter, Sakai Toru -- now a freelance writer based in Taipei -- questioned Western media's motives in consistently reporting news on Taiwan from Beijing's perspective.
"Why don't the Western media report on US President George W. Bush from a Middle Eastern perspective? -- such as `The leader widely known as the scum of the world made a surprise visit to Iraq yesterday.' Or why, when reporting on Chinese President Hu Jintao [胡錦濤], can't Hu be referred to according to his ranking as the world's fourth-worst dictator?" Sakai said.
`Scum of the Nation'
Paul Tsai (
"The article isn't in keeping [with an otherwise acceptable track record]," Lu said of AP.
Panelists also lamented what they called a steady drain of foreign journalists from Taiwan, saying that while China's view on the country dominates Western coverage of cross-strait affairs, fewer foreign journalists are sticking around to report from Taipei's perspective.
"There are only 20 to 30 foreign journalists here now," Tsai said.
Speaking to the Taipei Times by phone yesterday, Taipei Foreign Correspondents' Club president Kathrin Hille said that although major Western news publications are no longer dispatching as many "staffers" to the country, "I don't think the total number of [foreign journalists] has declined. That always happens in news markets that matter less," she said of the thinning ranks of permanent correspondents from big-name media organizations. "Look, news is a market -- media serve to give their audiences what they think they're interested in and right now, everybody's interested in China," Hille said.
Pragmatic
"There's a need for people to read what you write and getting into a story from the China angle helps to ensure that," she added. "Taiwan's significance is declining."
"But, in a way, that's a good thing -- that means no disasters are coming out of this place," she said.
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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