Terrestrial TV stations could soon be required to broadcast at least two or three hours of children’s programming daily, the National Communications Commission (NCC) said yesterday.
The media regulator unveiled its guidelines on communications policy for children and teenagers ahead of National Children’s Day on Monday. In the guidelines, the commission proposed requiring TV channel operators to produce quality programs of various types for children and teenagers.
It also proposed setting clear regulations on the minimum number of hours available to these programs, as well as the specific times to broadcast them. The commission listed this as one of the policy goals it aims to accomplish within two to three years.
NCC Commissioner Weng Hsiao-ling (翁曉玲), who is in charge of the taskforce working on the guidelines, said research showed that the nation’s terrestrial TV channels allotted an average of 80 minutes a day for programming for children and teenagers. Ninety-three percent of those programs were cartoons imported from Japan, China, the US and other countries, and rerun rates were about 53 percent.
The number of hours allocated for children’s and teenagers’ programs on cable TV channels, meanwhile, only accounted for 6 percent of the total each day, she said.
“Given that children and teenagers account for 21 percent of the nation’s population, the TV programs available to them are clearly inadequate,” Weng said.
Weng called on the Executive Yuan to dedicate 0.1 percent of the nation’s budget for educational, scientific and cultural projects to funding the production of TV programs for children and teenagers.
The guidelines also state that the commission will reevaluate the nation’s TV program-rating system.
Jason Ho (何吉森), director of the commission’s communication content department, said the current system had many gray areas.
“Content of some TV series is not fit to be aired in general rating hours,” Ho said. “Nor are some of the cartoons, which may contain content inappropriate for children.”
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
US President Donald Trump said "it’s up to" Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be "very unhappy" with a change in the "status quo," the New York Times said in an interview published yesterday. Xi "considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing," Trump told the newspaper on Wednesday. "But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that," he added. "I hope he doesn’t do that." Trump made the comments in
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
RSS