The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) is scheduled to hold a symposium on Thursday to solicit opinions from all sectors of society on media acquisitions. The event comes amid growing public concern over the much-scrutinized sale of Taiwanese media outlets of Hong Kong-listed Next Media Group to a consortium that many believe could jeopardize the nation’s media diversity and freedom of the press.
“The commission is planning to hold a forum on Thursday to seek opinions from all walks of life on all cases pertaining to media acquisitions and social media market share,” FTC spokesmen Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) said yesterday, adding that a public hearing over the Next Media buyout would also be held in due course after involved parties filed a merger report with the commission.
The commission is also due to deliver a report to the legislature’s Economics Committee tomorrow on the pending deal involving Next Media Ltd, which has agreed to sell its Taiwanese businesses to Formosa Plastics Group chairman William Wong (王文淵), Chinatrust Charity Foundation chairman Jeffery Koo Jr (辜仲諒) and Want Want China Times Group chairman Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明) for NT$17.5 billion (US$601.2 million).
The deal includes the sale of Taiwan’s Chinese-language Apple Daily, Sharp Daily, Next Magazine and Next TV.
The deal has raised public concern since Hong Kong media baron Jimmy Lai (黎智英), founder of Next Media, revealed his plan to sell his four outlets in Taiwan last month.
Tsai’s role in the deal is particularly sensitive and controversial given his group’s ownership over many major media outlets in Taiwan, including the Chinese-language China Times.
Lai had said in an interview with the Apple Daily on Oct. 18 that he decided to finalize the sale only after ensuring that none of the funding would come from Tsai. Tsai’s appearance at a recent meeting between Next Media Group officials and representatives from Koo’s consortium held to finalize the deal startled the public.
Tsai’s involvement has since given rise to a series of protests, not only by several journalistic organizations, but also by indignant journalists from the unions of Apple Daily and Hong Kong’s Next Media Union, who fret about possible infringement on their newsroom autonomy.
According to an FTC report to the legislature, because involved buyers are still in the midst of negotiation over their investment proportions and regulations, it remains to be seen whether the joint acquisition falls within the framework of “merger” as stipulated by the Fair Trade Act (公平交易法).
“The pending deal is bound by law, provided that it falls within the definition of a merger under the acts as a merger, be filed with the commission,” the report said, adding that it would also notify concerned parties to tender such a report once the roster of business entities involved in the buyout is finalized.
Citing the Fair Trade Act, the report said that an application for merger should be approved “if the overall economic benefits outweigh the disadvantages resulting from competition restraint.”
The commission said it respected the jurisdictions of various government agencies to tackle the possible impacts of a cross-media merger, such as journalistic autonomy and media concentration.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,