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Whither Taiwan’s free media?
The 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.
Though the practice has already been characterized as “rampant,” it can only
intensify as the Ma government tries to sell more of its controversial
cross-strait policies (as they are bound to emerge) to an increasingly skeptical
Taiwanese audience.
Beyond Huang’s complaints are other equally worrying trends, all of which appear
to be directly or indirectly related to Ma’s policy of engaging Beijing. Some
media conglomerates with business interests in China, for example, have been
good students of Beijing and are now applying the same kind of self--censorship
that makes reporters’ lives there so difficult. Furthermore, unsubtle directives
to state-owned media to tone down criticism of Ma’s administration added to
growing evidence that political reporting is being discouraged to make room for
business news, should give us pause (a quick glance at a Singaporean newspaper
should be sufficient to highlight the shortcomings of politically sanitized
publications operating in a “soft authoritarian” environment).
It gets worse. Laws that have been implemented or are being considered, such as
the Computer-Processed Personal Data Protection Act (電腦處理個人資料保護法) and amendments
to the Children and Youth Welfare Act (兒童及少年福利法), will make it increasingly
difficult for reporters to access critical information on individuals or, for
example, to describe scenes of violence. The first gives government agencies
arbitrary authority to decide what kind of information can be released in “the
public interest,” while the latter, though meant to protect children, can also
unduly embellish reality and prevent key information from being made public.
In and of themselves, such measures could have a beneficial effect on society,
but in the wrong hands, they could quickly turn into instruments of repression,
just as nuclear energy can be used to provide electricity or annihilate cities.
All of this is occurring under the shadow of calls by senior Chinese officials
for greater media cooperation across the Taiwan Strait, which, because of
Beijing’s unyielding stance on freedom of expression, can only have a
corrupting, if not chilling, effect on the media this side of the strait.
Before it’s too late, let us hope that more whistleblowers like Huang, people
with integrity and a sense of civic responsibility — not just in the media, but
also in academia and government — will sound the alarm. Reporters are not being
rounded up or attacked like in Russia or China, but the muzzling effect, though
subtle, exists nonetheless and is inexorably chipping away at citizens’ right to
unfiltered and unaltered information.
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