Whether political parties, the government or the military should be allowed to invest in media outlets should be negotiated by the political parties, National Communications Commission (NCC) Chairman Howard Shyr (石世豪) said on Monday at the legislature, adding that such rules should not be stipulated in the acts used to regulate media.
Shyr made the remarks in response to questions from Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Cheng Yung-peng (鄭運鵬) about the five new acts the commission has drafted in a bid to tackle digital convergence issues.
The draft acts were passed by the Cabinet at its weekly meeting last week.
Premier Simon Cheng (張善政) had said proposals heralded a new age, and Shyr had said that they would enable businesses in the communications industry to compete fairly and innovatively, and remove the barriers that would prevent Taiwan from joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
However, Cheng Yung-peng on Monday said that the draft acts would not include a clause banning such investment by the government, political parties and the military, but instead state that such a stipulation should occur in the Budget Act (預算法) and the political party act.
However, the former does not indicate clearly that the government is not allowed to invest in media outlets, while political controversies have delayed passage of the latter, the lawmaker said.
The commission’s proposals are as “food whose dates of production are in the future,” Cheng Yung-peng said, adding that it was pinning its hopes on resolving all the problems generated by the investment ban through a controversial piece of legislation that political parties have been debating for years.
Shyr responded by saying that the version of the proposals approved by the Cabinet stipulate that investment in media outlets by political parties, the government and the military should be handled based on the laws regulating the investments made by those groups.
If the law does not yet exist, the government would continue enforcing the law that is already in place, he said.
The ban has been in place for more than a decade, but an increasing number of people are debating whether the government should play a bigger role in the aggregation of media contents and the allocation of resources to develop the broadcasting industry, Shyr said.
Even though the Budget Act does not specify that the government cannot invest in media, Shyr said the government’s budget has to be scrutinized following the procedures laid out in the act.
“The range of permissible actions for the political parties should be negotiated among political parties. Media outlets are simply receiving the investment. It is inappropriate that the laws that are supposed to regulate the media outlets end up regulating the political parties in reverse. To tackle the problem, one has to deal with it from the source,” he said.
Media outlets can be punished if even one of their shares are owned by the government, even though such an investment could be made through the government funds in the public trading market and, in almost all cases to date, does not hold a significant number of shares to control the operation of the outlets.
When media outlets appeal fines for having government funding, the courts have almost always ruled in favor the outlets.
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