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.
Taiwan has received more than US$70 million in royalties as of the end of last year from developing the F-16V jet as countries worldwide purchase or upgrade to this popular model, government and military officials said on Saturday. Taiwan funded the development of the F-16V jet and ended up the sole investor as other countries withdrew from the program. Now the F-16V is increasingly popular and countries must pay Taiwan a percentage in royalties when they purchase new F-16V aircraft or upgrade older F-16 models. The next five years are expected to be the peak for these royalties, with Taiwan potentially earning
STAY IN YOUR LANE: As the US and Israel attack Iran, the ministry has warned China not to overstep by including Taiwanese citizens in its evacuation orders The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday rebuked a statement by China’s embassy in Israel that it would evacuate Taiwanese holders of Chinese travel documents from Israel amid the latter’s escalating conflict with Iran. Tensions have risen across the Middle East in the wake of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran beginning Saturday. China subsequently issued an evacuation notice for its citizens. In a news release, the Chinese embassy in Israel said holders of “Taiwan compatriot permits (台胞證)” issued to Taiwanese nationals by Chinese authorities for travel to China — could register for evacuation to Egypt. In Taipei, the ministry yesterday said Taiwan
Taiwan is awaiting official notification from the US regarding the status of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) after the US Supreme Court ruled US President Donald Trump's global tariffs unconstitutional. Speaking to reporters before a legislative hearing today, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said that Taiwan's negotiation team remains focused on ensuring that the bilateral trade deal remains intact despite the legal challenge to Trump's tariff policy. "The US has pledged to notify its trade partners once the subsequent administrative and legal processes are finalized, and that certainly includes Taiwan," Cho said when asked about opposition parties’ doubts that the ART was
If China chose to invade Taiwan tomorrow, it would only have to sever three undersea fiber-optic cable clusters to cause a data blackout, Jason Hsu (許毓仁), a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator, told a US security panel yesterday. In a Taiwan contingency, cable disruption would be one of the earliest preinvasion actions and the signal that escalation had begun, he said, adding that Taiwan’s current cable repair capabilities are insufficient. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) yesterday held a hearing on US-China Competition Under the Sea, with Hsu speaking on
RSS