The Cabinet yesterday approved a draft bill requiring owners of broadcast media to sign an editorial agreement with their news departments to ensure that management does not interfere with the independent operation of news channels or news programs.
Executive Yuan spokesperson Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said the draft of the broadcasting media monopolization prevention and diversity preservation act (廣播電視壟斷防制與多元維護法), a bill that activists have been pushing hard since last year following the controversial proposed acquisition of Next Media by the Want Want China Times Group and others, was among the Cabinet’s priority bills for the current legislative session.
Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) has instructed the National Communications Commission to actively communicate with lawmakers to have the bill passed, Cheng added.
The proposed law will not be retroactive, meaning media outlets whose media acquisition applications had been approved before it is enacted will not be required to comply with the new regulations.
If the bill is passed by the legislature, the commission would have the mandate to ban mergers between print and broadcasting media if such a merger would give them influence over public opinion comparable with a television viewership rate of more than 20 percent.
A merger involving broadcasting media outlets would also be banned if the readership rates of newspapers or weekly magazines owned directly or indirectly by the broadcasting media outlets amounted to more than 10 percent, the bill states.
If a cross-media merger involves news channels or channels airing news programs, the commission could ban the merger if it would create an influence comparable with a TV viewership rate of 15 percent, the draft stated.
It could also ban mergers among terrestrial TV services or the merger of radio services if one of the parties to the proposed merger reaches 75 percent of the nation’s population.
A merger of two radio services would be banned if it would create a listenership rate exceeding 15 percent in a certain area or a national listening rate of more than 10 percent.
Mergers of satellite channels would be banned if they would create a TV viewership rate exceeding 15 percent.
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,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: