The National Communications Commission (NCC) yesterday said that it would resubmit a draft media monopolization prevention and diversity preservation bill to the Executive Yuan, which would be the third version put forward.
Following calls in 2012 to prevent media monopolies, the commission submitted its first proposal in 2013, which secured preliminary approval from the legislature’s Transportation Committee.
However, as the Act Governing the Exercise of Legislative Power (立法院職權行使法) states that the legislative body at the new legislative session should discontinue deliberations on unsettled bills from the previous session, except for budgetary bills and petitions, the 2013 proposal was killed.
In January, the NCC passed a revision and submitted it to the Executive Yuan, which returned it to the commission last month.
“The Executive Yuan said that the proposal does not address issues resulting from competition between Chunghwa Telecom’s multimedia-on-demand [MOD] and cable TV systems, and it wanted us to reconsider the issues,” Department of Legal Affairs Acting Director Huang Wen-che (黃文哲) said.
The commission put more emphasis on maintaining professionalism and independence of news media in its latest revision, Huang said.
In other developments, the commission on Thursday next week is to hold a hearing on proposed amendments to the regulations governing the establishment, evaluation and license renewal of satellite broadcasting businesses, which would revise the definition of first-time broadcasts to reduce rerun rates on cable channels.
In February, a Consumers’ Foundation study showed that cable channels generally have an exceedingly high rerun rate, at times reaching 50 percent.
Under the current rules, a cable channel could meet the criteria for a first-time broadcast even if it shows a movie or program that has been aired on other channels, as long as it has never broadcast the item itself.
The amendment would change the definition of first-time broadcasts to exclude movies and programs that have aired on a cable or MOD channel in the preceding five years.
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