Reporters Without Borders (RSF) director-general Thibaut Bruttin praised Taiwan’s free media in an interview last week, but added that work still needed to encourage more editorial independence in local newsrooms.
“Taiwan can be proud of its free media ... [but] we think it’s important to go to the next step,” Bruttin said in an interview in Taipei on Friday.
Bruttin lauded Taiwan as a “role model” for press freedom in Asia and said he hoped that it would continue to “build up its model” and “show the way to other countries in the region.”
Photo courtesy of RSF via CNA
In the 2024 World Press Freedom Index released by RSF in May, Taiwan moved up eight positions from last year to 27th in the rankings out of 180 countries and regions, and ranked second in Asia after East Timor.
“Taiwan really is one of the test cases for the robustness of journalism in the world,” he said, reflecting on the nation’s transformation from an authoritarian regime that censored information into a vibrant democracy that fights disinformation.
However, Taiwan’s free press is not without criticism, Bruttin said, calling for media reforms to address the lack of editorial independence in newsrooms, which he said had undermined the media’s credibility.
Bruttin, who visited Taiwan for the first time as the head of RSF from Monday to Friday last week to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the non-governmental organization’s Asia-Pacific office in Taipei, described the “credibility deficit” in a recent op-ed as “a real Achilles heel of Taiwanese democracy.”
“It’s good that the media is free, but freedom is not necessarily something that sums up what journalism is,” he said. “At RSF, we fight for free, independent and pluralistic media.”
Taiwan must work on preventing its journalism industry from being “weaponized” against democracy, Bruttin said, warning against “narratives that are obeying vested interests, either commercial or ideological, or geopolitical.”
He said the polarized and politicized media has resulted in a credibility crisis in journalism in Taiwan, citing the Digital News Report issued by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
The report said that in Taiwan, only 33 percent of 2,011 respondents said they trusted most news most of the time.
RSF has called on the government to increase funding for public media, adopt a “coregulation” mechanism to encourage editorial independence and provide incentives to media outlets committed to respecting journalistic ethics, among other measures.
Bruttin said RSF would continue using Taiwan as an Asia-Pacific hub for its monitoring and advocacy work in 33 countries and regions in East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania.
One of the main issues is to continue calling for the release of Hong Kong media mogul and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai (黎智英), who has been in detention since December 2020 for his alleged involvement in democracy protests that rocked the territory a year earlier.
“We need to make people aware of the fact that they are keeping locked in solitary confinement a 70-something media executive who just had one of the freest, most popular Hong Kong dailies,” he said.
Lai, 76, is facing charges of collusion with foreign powers under the draconian National Security Law introduced by Beijing in June 2020 and could face life imprisonment.
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