Da Ai TV has been given one more week to provide all information explaining how it came to a decision to cancel the television series Jiachang’s Heart (智子之心), the National Communications Commission (NCC) said yesterday.
The network was reported to have canceled the soap opera after airing only two episodes at the beginning of last month due to criticism from Chinese netizens, who said it romanticized the 1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War.
The network denied that it pulled the series because of pressure from China, saying it had done so to “maintain harmony.”
The commission first asked the network’s chief executives to explain at a weekly commissioners’ meeting on May 30 why it had canceled the series.
Da Ai executives told the meeting that it was canceled amid concern that certain images could trigger altercations between different ethnic groups, which goes against the network’s founding purpose to promote social harmony.
The network also said that it had activated emergency procedures to cancel the series, while conceding that the cancelation was major negligence on its part.
The commissioners then demanded to know the details of the “emergency procedures” undertaken by the network, ordering it to submit the minutes of meetings among network executives and complaints from viewers about the series that led to its final decision to cancel the series.
However, in a written response to the commission’s requests, Dai Ai denied being negligent in abruptly canceling the series.
The reversal prompted NCC commissioners to demand that network executives visit the commission to clarify its position.
Da Ai director-general Susan Yeh (葉樹姍) showed up yesterday, but neither clarified the change in its position or provided the information that the commission requested, NCC spokesman Wong Po-tsung (翁柏宗) said.
Yeh avoided answering key questions and gave only trivial responses, Wong added.
Da Ai said it would provide the information that the commissioners requested after its ethics committee holds a meeting on Friday next week.
However, the commissioners said the two matters are unrelated and the network should submit the requested information as soon as possible, Wong said.
“We are not asking the network to resume the broadcast of the television series, but it must explain why it canceled the series and how it affected viewers,” he said.
Asked what the commission would do if Da Ai keeps stonewalling, Wong said that the commission would not stop investigating the case.
“I cannot say what we would do now because the commissioners have yet to deliver a ruling on the case, but we would persevere in our responsibility as the administrator in charge,” he said.
The commission has said that it expected a thorough explanation from the network as it took three years to plan, produce and release the series, but it only took one week for the network to decide to cancel the show.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater