The National Communications Commission (NCC) yesterday said it has asked SET News (三立新聞台) to investigate its erroneous reporting on the vote count for Pingtung County commissioner in Saturday’s elections.
The cable news network mixed up the votes for Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chou Chun-mi (周春米) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Su Ching-chuan (蘇清泉) onscreen, making it appear as if Chou was trailing Su on the ballot.
Chou won the election with 217,537 votes, surpassing Su by about 11,000 votes, Central Election Commission (CEC) data showed.
Photo: CNA
NCC Vice Chairman Wong Po-tsung (翁柏宗) said that the error was jointly discovered by NCC and CEC officials while monitoring media coverage of election results on Saturday.
“We have recorded the network’s election coverage and turned it over to the CEC, which will determine if it had contravened the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法),” Wong said.
“Per Article 22 of the Satellite Broadcasting Act (衛星廣播電視法), we will also ask the network to brief us about the situation on election day. Meanwhile, the network’s media ethics committee must conduct an investigation into its election day coverage, publish the investigation report on the network’s Web site and submit the report to the NCC. We will task an independent content review committee to review the report and check if the network has contravened the Satellite Broadcasting Act,” he said.
Based on footage obtained by the NCC, the error occurred at 8:11pm on Saturday and was corrected at 8:12pm, Wong said.
At 8:46 pm, political commentator Cheng Hung-yi (鄭弘儀), who was the host of the SET News’ special election day program, apologized about the error, saying that the network took the mistake seriously, Wong said.
The NCC received 17 election-related complaints, including 12 received before election day and five on election day, Wong said.
The five complaints received on election day were about the Taipei mayoral election: two were on SET News, two on Formosa News and one on ERA News.
Some people watching SET News over the Internet on Saturday said the network seems to have a tendency to inflate the vote.
Votes for DPP Taipei mayoral candidate Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) surged to 376,702 about 100 minutes after polls closed at 4pm, while votes for KMT mayoral candidate Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) hit 399,214.
At the time, the CEC Web site showed Chiang and Chen with 3,492 and 2,811 votes respectively, they said.
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