Taiwanese powerlifter Lin Tzu-hui (林資惠) won the bronze in the women’s 79kg category at the Rio de Janeiro Paralympic Games on Sunday, but most Taiwanese could not watch because no television channel broadcast the Games.
Lin, 35, contracted polio when she was only nine months old. She won gold medals in the 75kg category at the 2004 Athens Paralympics and 2008 Beijing Paralympics. She also won the bronze in the same category at the 2012 London Paralympics.
Lin won the bronze this year despite an injury she sustained during training.
Photo: CNA
Taiwan’s only other medal was a silver in the men’s team table tennis tournament after the team lost to South Korea in the final on Friday last week.
However, Taiwanese could not watch the achievements on cable TV or the multimedia-on-demand (MOD) system offered by Chunghwa Telecom.
The lack of TV coverage spurred online discussion.
A netizen wrote on Professional Technology Temple — the nation’s largest academic online bulletin board — that he was hoping to watch some of the Games on MOD, but instead it reran events from the Summer Olympics.
“[Japan’s] NHK broadcasts the Paralympic Games live. Taiwan is a nation that discriminates against people with disabilities after all and lacks barrier-free facilities for them,” he said.
The comment drew mixed reaction.
One person said viewership is the determining factor when deciding whether to cover an event, adding that broadcasting companies are not charities.
Others said that not broadcasting the Paralympics cannot be equated with discriminating against people with disabilities.
They said TV networks chose not to broadcast the Paralympics because nobody watches them.
Taiwan is not the only nation grappling with a dearth of coverage of the Paralympics.
NBC in the US promised to allocate 66 hours of airtime for the Paralympics. However, that pales in comparison with the airtime dedicated to the Summer Olympics, which reached 6,755 hours, US blogger Sage Boggs said.
The lack of coverage of the Paralympics became ironic when four visually impaired runners in the 1,500m final ran faster than any Olympian in the same category, he wrote.
Pointing to the British network Channel 4’s coverage of the 2012 London Paralympics’ opening ceremony, which drew 11.2 million viewers, Boggs said it is not that there is not much appetite for the Paralympics in the US.
“It is just we’re too busy eating up football to realize there are athletes in Rio breaking world records,” he wrote.
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
TRICKED INTO MOVING: Local governments in China do not offer any help, and Taiwanese there must compete with Chinese in an unfamiliar setting, a researcher said Beijing’s incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China are only intended to lure them across the Taiwan Strait, after which they receive no real support, an expert said on Sunday. Over the past few years, Beijing has been offering a number of incentives that “benefit Taiwanese in name, while benefiting China in reality,” a cross-strait affairs expert said on condition of anonymity. Strategies such as the “31 incentives” are intended to lure Taiwanese talent, capital and technology to help address China’s economic issues while also furthering its “united front” efforts, they said. Local governments in China do not offer much practical
‘ORDINARY PEOPLE’: A man watching Taiwanese military drills said that there would be nothing anyone could do if the situation escalates in the Taiwan Strait Many people in Taiwan look upon China’s military exercises over the past week with calm resignation, doubting that war is imminent and if anything, feeling pride in their nation’s determination to defend itself. After a visit to Taiwan last week by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, China has sent ships and aircraft across an unofficial buffer between Taiwan and China’s coast and missiles over Taipei and into waters surrounding the nation since Thursday last week. However, Rosa Chang, proudly watching her son take part in Taiwanese military exercises that included dozens of howitzers firing shells into the Taiwan Strait off
RSS