Former New Power Party legislator Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) yesterday accused Want Want China Times Media Group founder Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明) of lying to the National Communications Commission (NCC) during a public hearing on CTi News’ license renewal.
Tsai is the cable news channel’s largest shareholder, and he attended the commission’s administrative hearing on Monday, where he denied meddling in the channel’s operations.
He told the hearing that he only visited CTi News, as well as other media outlets belonging to the group, two to three times per year — at the Ghost Festival and other occasions — to offer prayers with the employees.
Screen grab from Facebook.
He and group executives use a group chat on WeChat to communicate, and he would sometimes use it to express his views on certain news, but the executives did not necessarily take his views when deciding how to cover stories, Tsai said.
Huang said that was an outright lie.
“Tsai and Want Want China Times Group executives are all in a WeChat group, which is filled with instructions from Tsai on how certain new stories should be covered. Instead of defying Tsai, the executives all say that they receive his messages and follow his instructions,” Huang said.
“These conversations clearly show how Tsai manipulates the news by using the group’s news media and CTi News is no exception,” he said.
“It is ludicrous to read these conversations and then hear the channel’s management speak about ‘internal control mechanisms,’ ‘media ethics guidelines’ and ‘independence in the editorial department’ at the hearing,” Huang said.
One screenshot that Huang posted on Facebook is of Tsai giving the group’s news media the green light to pummel the commission after CTi News was fined NT$200,000 for misreporting a statement from a campaign rally host before the 2018 nine-in-one local election.
In the screenshot, Tsai says that the commission has no right to become “a hitman” for the Democratic Progressive Party.
China Times president Wang Feng (王丰) and then-Want Want China Times Group vice president Chiu Chia-yu (邱佳瑜) said that they had received Tsai’s message, Huang said, adding that Chiu had told him that she could criticize NCC during CTi News’ evening news programs and News Tornado (新聞龍捲風) talk show.
Tsai responded by saying that Huang was engaged in a mudslinging campaign and spreading rumors about him.
“He [Huang] accused me of using a chat room that I share with my colleagues to control CTi News by showing conversations that were taken out of context,” Tsai said yesterday.
“I am an ordinary person and can talk with whomever I want. Why did not the person who took the screenshots show what I said about President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and how I wished for her to be not stuck in the strife between the pan-green and pan-blue camps,” he said.
Many of the news stories that he commented on had been reported by other news channels, he said.
He uses his own YouTube channel to publicize his personal beliefs, so he has no need to use CTi News to do so, Tsai said.
One of his chatroom messages in April last year said that former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Lee Yung-ping (李永萍) should not be invited to appear on CTi News’ talk shows, because she was critical of then-Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), but Lee appeared in one of its shows on May 29 last year, Tsai said.
That showed that what he said in the chat room had no bearing on the channel’s decisions, he added.
Meanwhile, Huang has accused CTi News of being part of the “red media,” without offering any proof, Tsai said.
The channel has received a lot of criticism from other news media outlets and the public, he said.
“Everyone can see clearly what we have been going through, so it is no wonder that more than 53 percent of the people said they do not want the government to shut down CTi News,” Tsai said.
The commission said it was continuing to collect and review material on CTi’s license renewal application.
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