Control Yuan member Frank Wu (吳豐山) yesterday described the lingering controversy concerning board members at the Taiwan Public Television Service (PTS) as a “disgrace to the country” as he accepted requests from civil groups to look into the case.
A group of media reform activists from various organizations yesterday filed a complaint with the Control Yuan against Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) and Philip Yang (楊永明), former heads of the now-dissolved Government Information Office (GIO), the previous supervisory agency of the PTS.
Lin Lih-yun (林麗雲), director of the Graduate Institute of Journalism at National Taiwan University, said the former GIO officials should be charged with “negligence of duties” for failing to resolve the dispute, which has lasted for about 600 days.
The lengthy delay in forming a new board for the PTS, caused mainly by the GIO’s failure to act, has negatively affected the public interest, Lin said.
The controversy originated in June 2009 when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-dominated legislature passed an amendment to the Public Television Act (公共電視法) to raise the number of PTS board members. Civil groups alleged that the move was a political interference in the operation of the public broadcaster, and judicial wrangling between the government and managers ensued.
The three-year tenure of the sitting board members of the PTS expired in December 2010, but the broadcaster has not been able to bring in new, legally elected members.
“Over the past 18 months, we have not seen the GIO ministers proactively seeking to resolve the problem, leaving the board unable to decide on major policies concerning the PTS. We urged the Control Yuan to either impeach the former GIO ministers or censure the government,” Lin said.
The Ministry of Culture — the new government agency in charge of overseeing the PTS — is scheduled to hold a review meeting to select a new PTS governing body on Friday.
As it appeared unlikely that the ministry would publicize the nominee list beforehand, a group comprised of media reform advocates and academics, published an open letter on Saturday calling for review committee members for nominees to the PTS board of directors to demand an open and transparent review to avoid becoming a rubber-stamp for the government.
According to Huang Shih-shin (黃世鑫), a review committee member recommended by the Democratic Progressive Party, the ministry insists on disclosing the nomination list to the committee, just three hours before the review meeting on Friday.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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