Legislators across party lines yesterday said they were confident they could push through regulations barring the government from buying advertorials before the legislature goes into recess on Wednesday.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Lin Yi-shih (林益世) told reporters he was optimistic the proposal would clear the legislative floor before the session concludes this week.
Lin said the KMT would support the version proposed by the Executive Yuan, which would prohibit product placement, or embedded marketing, by government agencies in news reports and that would oblige the government to specify the nature of its advertorials whenever it needs to promote its policies.
Lin said he had reservations about a similar proposal by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) that would bar the -government, state-run enterprises and government-funded organizations and businesses from implementing embedded marketing in news coverage when pushing government policies and forbid all politically motivated advertorials.
Lin said it would be unfair to apply the restriction included in the DPP proposal to state-run enterprises and state-funded businesses.
The controversy over the government’s use of embedded marketing in media came under scrutiny after Dennis Huang (黃哲斌), senior reporter at the Chinese-language China Times, resigned in protest last month against what he called an “invasion of regular news pages by advertorials.”
Huang, who worked for the China Times for more than 16 years, has since launched a signature campaign opposing the use of advertorials by politicians, saying the practice had become rampant under both the KMT and the DPP governments.
In response to the campaign, the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) late last month promised the government that it would refrain from using advertorials for political purposes, adding that government campaigns promoting its policies should all be marked as ads.
Asked for comment, DPP caucus whip Pan Men-an (潘孟安) said the caucus would give priority to relevant bills before the legislature deals with the central government’s fiscal budget request.
The legislature on Friday referred the bills for further cross-party negotiation. In accordance with legislative regulations, the bills could be stalled for a maximum of one month unless legislators reach a consensus before that.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching