The National Communications Commission (NCC) said on Wednesday its broadcasting and TV programs consulting committee would soon review the remarks made by two TV news anchors about charges of money laundering surrounding former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).
The committee said it would also review TV news coverage of a firefighter who was reported to have died while searching for the bodies of victims in the Houfeng Bridge (后豐橋) collapse last month. The information was not verified and was later shown to be false.
NCC spokesperson Lee Ta-sung (李大嵩) said that in the first case, CTI-TV (中天電視) anchor P.J. Huang (黃鵬仁) used the f-word while reading news about the money-laundering case in a morning news program.
Huang’s comments came to the commission’s attention after it received complaints from viewers.
TVBS anchorwoman Liao Ying-ting (廖盈婷), meanwhile, was heard uttering that Chen was a “psycho” who should “eat shit” over an open microphone immediately after the previous anchorperson reported that an independence veteran had asked Chen to donate the NT$700 million (US$21.7 million) he is alleged to have diverted to help set up a new political party.
The station penalized Liao with two demerits and removed her from the anchor desk.
In the second case, the commission found that TVBS-N, SET TV (三立新聞) and ERA News (年代新聞) had failed to verify sources before reporting the death of the firefighter.
“We asked the three stations to come over and brief us two weeks ago,” Lee said. “It turns out that TVBS-N first reported that a rescue team had found the dead firefighter, after its journalist overheard a conversation on the firefighters’ walkie-talkies.”
“SET and ERA News said they saw the news on TVBS-N and used it as source,” he said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods