New regulation is necessary to close legal loopholes and prevent corporations holding sway over the media, a panel of academics said yesterday at a public hearing on legislation against media monopolization called by New Power Party (NPP) legislators.
National Chung Cheng University professor of communications Hu Yuan-hui (胡元輝) said that the national media market appeared to have entered a “crucial stage” of widespread mergers, which raised the possibility of corporations seeking to interfere in news coverage for political ends.
“So far, the National Communications Commission has been at a loss to handle these cases,” he said, “If we do not quickly pass legislation establishing legal standards, it will be very difficult to go back after the media market has been monopolized by a small number of corporations.”
Chiang Ya-chi (江雅綺), an assistant professor of intellectual property rights at National Taipei University of Technology, said that there is need for better regulation of the media market beyond the existing anti-trust laws.
“The threshold for regulating the media market should be lower than that mandated by the Fair Trade Act (公平交易法),” she said. “Media is a special industry that is not just an economic venture — it serves as the foundation for democratic government.”
She said that new legislation is important to mandate that public interests — including the protection of media diversity — be taken into consideration during reviews of media mergers.
She added that there should be a special focus on TV because of its dominant role in influencing public opinion.
National Chung Cheng University professors of communications Chad Liu (劉昌德) said that the outsized market power wielded by cable providers is the most important problem facing the nation’s media industry.
“The platforms are too large and too few. There are only a few cable providers, but they control the flow of all of the nation’s TV programming, which puts our words in the hands of a small minority of capitalists,” he said, adding that a glut of TV stations — many of which operate separately from providers — also hurt programming by preventing the industry from concentrating investment.
Chad called for a ban on cable providers operating channels in a bid to limit their influence and called for special taxes to be implemented on cable providers to raise funds for TV stations to support high-quality programming.
“We need a simple touch. Right now the commission’s management is extremely complicated with numerous conditions and remedial measures attached to merger approvals, but there has been no effect,” he said.
NPP executive chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said that the party’s draft bill would be based on the 2013 version passed by the Legislative Yuan’s Transportation Committee, with a framework including forbidding unfair competition, including “public interest” as part of a clearer review process and laying out rules to separate media and finance.
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:
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