Little by little, with subtle changes and amendments, the media environment in Taiwan is being boiled to death like the proverbial frogThe media environment in Taiwan is in a state of crisis, one that did not fully capture the public’s imagination until someone from deep inside said he’d had enough and resigned.
US-based Freedom House may have called it “one of the freest in Asia,” but Taiwanese media are under severe pressure and many indicators are pointing in the wrong direction. The signs were there, but it took reporter Huang Je-bing’s (黃哲斌) resignation from the China Times on Dec. 12, after 16 years of service, to draw attention to the severity of the problem and prompt fellow journalists into action.
The source of Huang’s discontent was the growing practice of government product placement in the media to promote its policies, which in effect constitutes the masquerading of propaganda as news.
The potential for abuse is self-evident, especially when we put it in the context of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration’s friendly attitude toward one of Asia’s worst offenders in terms of media freedom: China.
My unsigned editorial, published today in the Taipei Times, continues here.
My Taiwanese (of Nationalist family) mother-in-law was in the UK recently and asked me: "so who controls your media?" She had a few other telling questions that could only come from someone used to living in a closed society.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, "you don't know what you don't know"!
ReplyDeleteI am most worried about the so called "independents" in Taiwan, they actually receive all the info from the media without any question or doubt. Worst of all, these independents usually consider themselves as "intellectuals", formulating their judgement based on the mostly tainted or skewed info received from the media.
"Worst of all, these independents usually consider themselves as "intellectuals", formulating their judgement based on the mostly tainted or skewed info received from the media."
ReplyDeleteOf course, and, unlike such obviously enlightened personages as you, these "intellectuals" aren't capable of making the "correct" decisions are they?