Momo Kids TV was fined NT$600,000 (US$20,026) yesterday for airing cartoons containing content deemed inappropriate for children.
Last year, the National Communications Commission (NCC) received dozens of complaints from parents when the children’s channel broadcast an episode of the Japanese cartoon School Rumble (校園迷糊大王) depicting high-school students watching a pornographic movie together. They also complained that the episode contained a scene of jiggling breasts and showed actors moaning in pornographic movies.
The commission had decided to forward the recorded material from the controversial episode to an independent content review committee, formed by experts not -affiliated with the commission.
NCC communication content department director Jason Ho (何吉森) said 18 experts attending the review meeting earlier this month unanimously agreed that the channel had committed a very serious violation. They ruled it had infringed Item 2, Article 17 of the Satellite Broadcasting Act (衛星廣播電視法), in which domestic and foreign satellite broadcasting businesses are banned from airing content that would “impair the physical or mental health of children or juveniles.”
NCC spokesperson Chen Jeng-chang (陳正倉) said the committee members disapproved of the channel’s content, adding that the channel’s license could be revoked if it failed to improve.
“Committee members said that the channel’s programs target -preschoolers and school children, but the cartoon violated the general rating requirement,” the NCC said in a statement.
Apart from Momo, eight other channels and two other telecoms carriers were fined by the NCC ahead of the nine-day Lunar New Year holiday. The fines, including that for Momo, totaled NT$5.4 million.
SET TV News, CTi TV News and ETTV News were fined NT$300,000, NT$800,000 and NT$600,000 respectively for failing to distinguish between a television program and an advertisement, violating Article 19 of the Satellite Broadcasting Act. The three news channels were found to have interviewed salespeople as well as the chairman of a specific construction firm or feature projects launched by the firm.
SET and ETTV also aired -commercials for the construction firm immediately after they ran the news story.
“Each channel was fined differently based on the severity of the violations in the cases discussed and past records of violation,” Ho said.
SET TV News was also penalized NT$200,000 for its coverage of a story on how a nine-year-old girl posted an article on a Web site seeking cash for sex.
While the anchorperson reported the news, the production team ran an animated image of a woman performing oral sex in the background.
Star Movies, Channel V and three other channels on Chunghwa Telecom’s multimedia-on-demand (MOD) system were fined for airing content containing excessive violence or sexual abuse.
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