The US-based Citibank's subsidiary, Sycamore Ventures, has entered a bid to buy shares of China Television Company (CTV), Broadcasting Corporation of China (BCC), Central Daily News and other media outlets from the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) Huahsia Investment Holding Company. The plan has caused a political struggle between the KMT and the Government Information Office (GIO). From a legal, political, and commercial standpoint, the KMT is like a trapped beast putting up a desperate fight.
Taiwan's terrestrial frequencies belong to the Taiwanese people, and television and radio stations only have the government's special permission to use them. The Broadcasting and Television Law (
The KMT finds itself at a legal, political and moral disadvantage. Its reliance on special privileges to monopolize the broadcast media was already a source of social discontent. The DPP government is well within its rights when it calls for reinstating order in the broadcasting industry.
Foreign investment in the KMT-run media may influence the media environment. This would be to the dismay of local media outlets, which already operate in an excessively competitive market. The DPP government gains further when it highlights the KMT's interest in foreign investment.
The timing of the bid may prove an even greater test for the KMT. The party is in urgent need of funds in order to pay for campaigning in the year-end legislative elections. The party may therefore not be able hold out until the end of next year, when the Broadcasting and Television Law (
The KMT believes that selling party assets to foreign firms is the best way of preventing them from becoming "green." This is ironic, considering that the Broadcasting and Television Law was enacted by a legislature controlled by the KMT. They have nobody to blame but themselves. Any inadequately prepared foreign investor who fails to realize that this is not a simple business acquisition, but an intimately connected struggle between media and political forces, will likely find itself in deep trouble.
The dissolution of the KMT's media empire is a necessary part of Taiwan's democratization, for the force represented by the KMT-owned media is not in accordance with fair play or justice. That this political force is now being applied to loosen the KMT's grip on broadcast frequencies obtained through political means is a step in the right direction. But regardless of whether the government obtains the wireless frequencies from BCC, or the television frequencies from CTV, the transition process must be in accordance with the public good.
If this is not the case, we will simply be breaking up one monolithic media group to replace it with another. For Taiwanese society, replacing a blue group with a green group does not rid the country of political involvement in the media.
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