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NCC media monopoly
draft useless
By Huang Kuo-chang 黃國昌
The concern over the drafting of a broadcasting media monopolization prevention
and diversity preservation law, recently announced by the National
Communications Commission (NCC), has arisen because many consider the
bottom-line standard for prohibiting integration of companies to be excessively
lenient and fail to see how the draft could be effectively implemented.
In particular there is the readership rate and the viewership rate, which are,
according to the draft, to be calculated as a percentage of the nation’s
population of 23 million. This means that the average readership or viewership
figures for any given media outlet need to exceed 3.4 million and 4.6 million
people, or 15 percent and 20 percent of the population, respectively — as per
Article 23 of the draft — before the integration prohibition comes into effect.
It seems that the accusations levied at the NCC — that the draft is toothless
and not worth the paper it is printed on — are not without foundation.
Even if the base at which the readership or viewership rates are to be
calculated were amended, the serious loopholes that exist in the NCC’s draft
would still compromise it. One major omission is that there is no regulation
concerning integration between daily newspapers.
The Want Want China Times Group’s bid to buy the Apple Daily would have been
permissible according to the integration concept in Article 7 of this NCC draft.
However, one problem is that the draft restricts itself to applying only to
integration of the broadcast and television media, and does not extend to
integration between two daily newspapers.
The NCC has tried to defend this flaw by saying that the integration of any
print medium that does not involve broadcast or television media lies beyond its
jurisdiction. However, not only does this statement run counter to the
organizational responsibilities of the NCC, it also contradicts the stated
regulatory remit that the NCC set out in the draft.
Section 3 of the draft deals with the protection of professionalism and
independence in the media. Article 29, for example, deals with the correction of
errors in reports and Article 30 deals with recourse. These articles are clearly
aimed at media that include print media, yet do not require newspapers to comply
with the integration requirements.
If print media do not lie within the jurisdiction of the NCC, as laid out in
Article 1 of the National Communications Commission Organization Act
(國家通訊傳播委員會組織法) where it stipulates that the NCC is to “enforce the
Constitution’s protection of freedom of speech” and “protect the media’s
professionalism and independence,” why would this draft, which the NCC is
responsible for implementing, regulate professionalism and independence in the
print media?
It also appears in Article 11 of the draft that the NCC, faced with the
contentious issue of newspaper integration — and the public opinion and debate
it is creating — sees its role as being limited to giving its opinions on
competition within the telecommunications broadcast market and on the balanced
development of multiculturalism, leaving the key issues for the Fair Trade
Commission (FTC) to deal with.
On the one hand, the NCC’s self-proclaimed remit to “pronounce its opinion” does
nothing to fulfill the organization’s two fundamental duties of enforcing the
Constitution’s protection of freedom of speech, and professionalism and
independence within the media.
On the other, when I asked the FTC, during its review of the Next Media Group
acquisition, to look beyond pure economic factors — Article 12 of the Fair Trade
Act (公平交易法) states that a merger could be approved “if the overall economic
benefit of the merger outweighs the disadvantages resulting from competition
restraint” — and consider the impact of media integration upon democratic values
and news professionalism in the nation, an FTC spokesperson said that the
commission’s position is that “non-economic factors” used to enforce the
protection of freedom of speech and the media’s professionalism and independence
are beyond its jurisdiction.
These two factors have caused a situation in which neither the NCC nor the FTC
seem to be responsible.
The Next Media Group acquisition case, which has created the perfect legislative
conditions for expediting regulation to prevent a media monopoly, has become an
example of why the NCC draft is useless.
If the FTC, which is to review this acquisition, prevaricates now and refuses to
consider media concentration and the news industry’s professionalism and
independence, this could be a grievous error that may do irreparable damage to
the nation’s democratic values.
Huang Kuo-chang is an associate research professor and director of the Center
for Empirical Legal Studies at the Academia Sinica’s Institutum Iurisprudentiae.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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