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Al Jazeera English TV makes debut in Taiwan

Former vice president Annette Lu, third right, attends the official Taiwan launch ceremony for the Al Jazeera English news channel in Taipei yesterday. Derl McCrudden, the network’s Asian bureau chief, is second from right. PHOTO: CNA

Al Jazeera English, the English-language service of the popular Arabic satellite news channel, made its debut yesterday in Taiwan.

The channel is now available through Chunghwa Telecom’s Multimedia-on-Demand (MOD) service, an Internet TV service offered by the state-controlled telecommunications giant that to date has almost 500,000 subscribers nationwide.

Speaking at the press conference in Taipei to mark the launch, Derl McCrudden, acting bureau chief of the Kuala Lumpur broadcast center, said that Al Jazeera had “no agenda other than the news” and would offer Taiwanese viewers unbiased analysis on global events.

Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), also in attendance, said she was pleased about the arrival of the new channel, as she had just had MOD installed in her house.

She added that the launch of Al Jazeera, which is unpopular with certain governments around the world, was yet another sign of Taiwan’s media freedom and showed how far the nation had progressed since the days of media censorship just a few decades ago.

Chunghwa Telecom president Lu Shyne-ching (呂學錦) said the channel would provide subscribers with an alternative view on events to established news channels.

Launched in November 2006 and with its Asian base in Kuala Lumpur, Al Jazeera English features news, documentaries and sports and reaches an estimated audience of 120 million households around the world.
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