The National Communications Commission (NCC) yesterday said that it would next week continue to deliberate over TV news stations’ coverage of the shutdown of Kansai International Airport in September last year, when Japan was struck by Typhoon Jebi.
The stations were asked to provide additional information on how they produced the reports, the commission said.
It has received multiple complaints that the stations quoted an Internet user claiming that the Chinese government sent 15 tour buses to evacuate its people stranded at the airport, even though the only bridge to the airport was closed, the commission said.
Although the claim later turned out to be false, the coverage was blamed for contributing to the suicide of Su Chii-cherng (蘇啟誠), who was director-general of the Osaka branch of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office until his death on Sept. 14 last year.
It was claimed that he had committed suicide due to severe criticism for not evacuating Taiwanese tourists stranded at the airport.
However, his wife in a statement in December denied that false information drove her husband to take his own life, saying that it was instead “anticipated humiliation” by his superiors.
Japan Broadcasting Corp aired a special report about Su’s death, titled “How Fake News Killed a Diplomat,” as a cautionary tale about the damage caused by misinformation.
NCC Acting Chairman Wong Po-tsung (翁柏宗) said that the commission had asked the TV stations’ managers — including those from Next TV, Eastern Broadcasting Corp, CtiTV, Sanlih and TVBS — to explain how they produced the reports about the nonexistent Chinese evacuation.
Some of them were asked to provide additional information, he added.
“Our principle is that news channels should follow their own code of conduct first. Should they fail to observe their self-disciplinary mechanisms, they should undertake external discipline from a third-party non-governmental agency or the NCC,” Wong said.
News channels should verify facts and follow the principle of fairness as stipulated in the Satellite Broadcasting Act (衛星廣播電視法), he added.
The commission has stipulated guidelines for broadcasters to help them enforce a fact-checking mechanism, NCC Department of Broadcasting and Content Director Huang Chin-yi (黃金益) said, adding that the guidelines state how the channels should handle online information if they use it as a source.
Wong confirmed that the commission would soon start monitoring how news stations cover major news stories and provide statistics to the public, so that people can evaluate the performance of news stations based on scientific evidence.
According to a preliminary plan, commission staffers would monitor noon and evening news broadcasts of every news station.
Monitoring the coverage would last from two weeks to a month, it said.
“We will let the numbers speak for themselves,” Huang said, adding that the project could begin in four months.
The Department of Broadcasting and Contents has about 50 staffers and is in charge of overseeing more than 300 channels, Huang said.
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
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