People are dissatisfied with untruthful and unfair content on television and radio, a National Communications Commission (NCC) report released yesterday showed.
The report was compiled by analyzing a total of 2,243 complaints about broadcasting content that the commission received last year. Among them, 2,112 cases were related to television content, compared with 131 cases about radio content.
The administration found that about 30 percent of the complaints were about untruthful and unfair content.
Approximately 13 percent were complaints about content in a specific program or commercial, while about 10 percent were about the “status quo” of the broadcast media as well as the government’s communication policies.
The subject of the complaints ranged from the broadcasting of unverified information, repeatedly airing the footage of victims killed in a disaster and their family members, invasion of privacy, product placements, the scarcity of international news reports and groundless accusations made by political commentators.
The report showed that the CTi TV’s Noon News topped other TV programs in terms of the number of complaints filed against it.
The commission said the complaints were about the network showing a list of the victims killed in the TransAsia Airways plane crash in Penghu in July 2014, when the report was actually about a TransAsia Airways plane crashing in Taipei in February last year.
In addition, the report also listed 190 cases in which broadcast media were punished for violating the regulations, with 100 of them involving the television content and 90 radio content.
In total, the commission collected NT$12.73 million (US$392,465) in fines from media outlets.
Fines related to TV or radio stations’ failure to maintain a clear distinction between content and commercials topped NT$8.41 million, which greatly exceeded the fines handed down for other types of violations.
JET TV was fined NT$3.6 million for violations in that particular category last year, the highest among television channels. It was followed by CTi TV, which was fined NT$1.8 million.
The number of complaints the commission received last year decreased by 7,554 compared with 2014.
Analysis of 2014’s complaints showed that CTi TV’s talk show News Tornado caused close to 6,000 complaints, which in turn boosted the number of complaints for that year.
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