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Want Want bid must be
stopped
By Huang Di-ying 黃帝穎
As the controversy over the National Communications Commission’s (NCC) review of
Want Want China Times Group’s bid to acquire cable TV services owned by China
Network Service (CNS) continues, Premier Sean Chen has nominated new members of
the commission, saying he expects the nominations to be approved by the
legislature before the end of July. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator
Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞), convener of the legislature’s Transportation Committee, has
promised that the case will be decided before the end of the current session.
Regardless of whether we are dealing with the current crop of NCC members or the
next, Want Want’s proposed acquisition cannot go ahead. The reasons for this are
threefold: first, to prevent media convergence; second, because Want Want
chairman Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明) is not fit to operate cable channels; and third,
for reasons of national security.
It is generally recognized in democracies the world over that concentrating a
nation’s media in the hands of a small number of organizations will lead to the
monopolization of expression, which contradicts the fundamental values of
pluralist democracy.
Want Want is already Taiwan’s largest mass media organization. If it now goes on
to acquire parts of CNS, it will control the viewing content of more than 1
million cable TV subscribers. Combined with the group’s already considerable
influence over news reporting in this country, the acquisition would almost
certainly cause monopolization of expression, threatening our democracy.
The next point is that the group’s chairman, Tsai, is unfit to run a media
organization.Tsai has instructed China Times journalists not to criticize the
president or government officials, he dismissed the China Times editor-in-chief
for publishing “[Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits Chairman]
Chen Yunlin is a C-lister,” he claimed in a Washington Post interview that the
person pictured obstructing the tanks in the Tiananmen Square Massacre “is still
alive,” indicating that he thought there was no massacre and he also offered a
NT$1 million (US$34,000) reward to anyone who could reveal the identity of a
current China Times reporter who, under the pseudonym Chien Chung-shih (錢衷時),
published an article in the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’
sister newspaper) in February criticizing the China Times for being pro-China.
Such behavior suggests that Tsai does not possess modern democratic values,
something that someone running a media empire should certainly have.
In addition, there was the major coverage in the China Times of China’s Fujian
Province Governor Su Shulin’s (蘇樹林) visit to Taiwan, to which the paper devoted
lavish attention five days in a row. Responding to a question in the
legislature, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) said an
investigation had shown there was “clear evidence” that the newspaper had been
involved in illegal advertising in this case.
Evidently, the Want Want bid is about more than mere media convergence: The
group’s willingness to help the Chinese government peddle propaganda in Taiwan
also constitutes a national security issue. The National Communications
Commission should be thinking in terms of preventing the acquisition on the
grounds of national security.
In the event that the commission is powerless to stop the acquisition on a legal
basis, the very least it should do is restrict the group’s right to operate a
news cable channel. This is really the comission’s legal bottom line.
In 2010, Dafu Media, owned by Daniel Tsai (蔡明忠), sought to acquire cable systems
owned by Kbro Co. Since Kbro already had its channels, which at the time had
more than 1 million subscribers, the National Communications Commission wanted
Dafu to make certain assurances before it would approve the acquisition, so as
to avoid excessive media convergence.
These assurances included guarantees that the company would not operate news or
finance channels without obtaining licenses, to prevent it from broadcasting its
own news channels on favorable frequencies and crowding out other news channels.
It also had to promise to abide by additional clauses stipulating that it would
operate its channels in a fair, reasonable and equitable manner.
The NCC should be rigorously applying the same standards of the Dafu bid to the
Want Want bid, because the latter already owns satellite news channels, such as
China Television and CTiTV. If Want Want succeeds in acquiring the CNS cable TV
services, it will own 12 channels and 11 cable TV services, covering over 1
million subscribers.
This would hand it more control, and presents a higher risk of media
convergence, than was present in the Dafu bid.
Article 6 of the Administrative Procedure Act (行政程序法) states: “No differential
treatment is permitted for administrative acts without a good cause.”
This is a concrete expression of the legal principle of administrative
self-restraint, as applied in the 2004 Administrative Supreme Court
interpretation No. 1392. This interpretation stated that, according to the
principle of equality enshrined in the Constitution, administrative bodies are
expected to deal with situations that are of a similar nature in an equal
manner, which is the essence of administrative self-restraint.
Based on this, and given that the circumstances for both the Want Want media
acquisition and the Dafu bid are essentially identical, the National
Communications Commission clearly cannot treat the Want Want acquisition
differently in its administrative handling of the approval process.
Instead, because the Want Want bid is likely to have a more significant impact
than the Dafu bid, the National Communications Commission should certainly be
applying the principle of administrative self-restraint to strictly forbid Want
Want from operating a news cable channel. The commission should also implement
other restrictions, even stricter than those that were applied to the Dafu bid.
Huang Di-ying is a lawyer and a member of the Taiwan Bar Association’s
Commission on Human Rights.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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