Mon, Sep 18, 2006 page8

• DPP fails to deal with media bias

  • By Huang Tien-lin 黃天鱗
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  When former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman Shih Ming-teh (施明德) declared at his anti-President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) sit-in that he would either oust Chen or die trying, he gave the demonstration an air of a valiant last stand.

  No matter what the Nazca lines were supposed to express or what kind of fate they were supposed to lead Taiwan to, one thing is for certain: Taiwan has already been drawn into China's "unlimited war" and in fact finds itself in a state of quasi-war. But most troubling is that the Taiwanese people and government seem not to realize that they are on the brink of a national crisis.

  What is unlimited war? It is a new idea of war invented by the People's Liberation Army. The concept presumes that "the battlefield is everywhere," and that the military must prepare to use any kind of method and be able to disseminate information anywhere. It also presumes that in the world today, anything can be turned into a weapon.

  For example, computer virus attacks, deliberate stock market crashes and scandalous news about leaders of hostile countries can all be considered a new type of weapon to trap and defeat enemies. The electronic media is naturally a key weapon in this kind of warfare.

  Because major media outlets fell under the control of a foreign regime for more than 50 years, their inner structure has been built around a deep pro-China ideological bias. This is a platform that China can exploit in its unlimited warfare, sometimes with the knowledge of the media it is using, but often without.

  When the scandals surrounding Chen exploded in mid-May, some people said they were spontaneous. But as the details emerged of the exact times and locations of the events, the news, information and pictures seemed to be the work of a large organization with a detailed plan.

  The information revealed was so exact that it seemed to have come from intelligence or investigative organizations, perhaps even from as far away as Australia. Every sign indicated that this was one of the links in China's unlimited war against Taiwan.

  Since the fastest way to topple a regime is by cutting off its head, the media are doing all they can to smear Chen. The media is an effective tool because after being bombarded by it long enough, people come to accept it and allow it to manipulate their opinions. This has certainly produced results over the past few months, as Chen's approval ratings have risen and fallen with the twists and turns of the scandal.

  According to the Chinese-language China Times, Chen's approval rating has fallen consistently, from 53 percent last September to 22.3 percent after the Sogo case broke in April. The scandal over the receipts from the presidential discretionary expense fund even led the anti-Chen movement into the Presidential Office itself.

  Another China Times survey showed that 50 percent of Taiwanese began to believe that the Presidential Office wasn't clean, finally giving the Black Gold Investigation Center of the prosecutors' office a reason to get involved.

  Regardless of how the protest to topple Chen turns out, Beijing has already used pro-China media as the platform for its unlimited war to reach two goals. Now that the investigation has ensured that the president's discretionary fund for state affairs is no longer "discretionary," this is tantamount to Taiwan taking off its diplomatic armor.

  Everyone knows the wars of diplomacy have a public side as well as a secret side. Now that Taiwan only has public diplomacy at its disposal while totalitarian China still has both, Beijing will have an even greater advantage. It has effectively broken the strength of pro-localization forces.

  But of course there is a reason for everything, and the success of the unlimited war is also a result of the DPP's six years in power. In terms of popular media policy, the transfer of power from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to the DPP in 2000 was a chance given to the DPP by the people to change the past extreme media bias toward China.

  But the DPP government has wasted six years, during which its inattention to the already weak pro-localization media caused both the Independent Evening Post and the Taiwan Daily to disappear. It also relaxed restrictions on selling Taiwanese newspapers in China. Since the media outlets advocating Taiwanese sovereignty and independence were kept out, this policy has actually supported the pro-unification media.

  The publication in Taiwan of the Hong Kong-owned Apple Daily is also a result of one of the DPP's "virtuous" policies, but it only takes a few days of reading to understand its basic stance.

  The DPP government bears the responsibility for the state the Taiwanese media is in today. The greatest irony of all is that it unintentionally has created its own problems.

  Huang Tien-lin is a former national policy adviser to the president.

  Translated by Marc Langer
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