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Taiwanese politics' media
circus
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - Getting politicians out of media
ownership is widely thought to be a worthy aim: there is
surely, the logic goes, a conflict of interest between
the politician with an agenda to push and the idea of
the critical scrutiny of public affairs by the fourth
estate. The fox should not live in, let alone run, the
henhouse.
It might seem laudable, therefore,
that Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has
finally woken up to the fact that three years into its
administration, and after literally decades of
complaining about media bias and manipulation while in
opposition, the party has decided to purge Taiwan's
media of political influence.
In reality, given
Taiwan's current state of affairs - an economic slump,
rising unemployment, the exhaustion of its traditional
business model and a drain of capital and know-how to
China - the party's zeal in this direction seems
misguided, self-defeating and indicative of the
government's impotence. With its reformist agenda
hampered by the DPP's lack of control of the
legislature, the government is trying to make good on at
least one promise from the 2000 presidential election as
the campaign for 2004 looms.
Things have come a
long way since 1995. In September that year, the DPP was
conducting a primary to choose its presidential
candidate for the election the following March. The
primary was being conducted by what was, at the time,
the unprecedented step of having massive rallies to
mobilize those with an opinion on the matter - party
membership was not a prerequisite - to turn up at the
rally and cast a vote for their chosen contender. For
Taiwan, with its newly democratized institutions less
than five years old, it was an exhilarating example of
almost anarchically democratic practice.
At that
time, broadcast media were dominated by three
terrestrial TV channels: China Television Co (CTV),
Chinese Television System (CTS) and Taiwan Television
Enterprise (TTV). Of these three companies, the
Kuomintang (KMT), the party then in power, as it had
been for the previous 50 years, owned 68 percent of CTV
and a small share of TTV, the KMT-controlled Taiwan
provincial government owned 49 percent of TTV and the
Ministry of National Defense owned 60 percent of CTS -
for whose staff KMT membership was obligatory.
Perhaps it was not surprising, therefore, that
opposition activities got rather short shrift from the
TV media. But how bad was indicated by a survey of a
week of the stations' main evening news broadcasts, all
of which usually were aired at 7pm, carried out by a
local newspaper. On average it was found that the
president, at the time Lee Teng-hui, received on average
some six minutes of coverage per night. Other KMT
party-related matters would receive between four and six
minutes. And the DPP? Nothing at all. The imbalance was
so obvious that even the government's own media
controller, the Government Information Office (GIO), was
embarrassed.
In the seven and a half years since
then, things have changed greatly. First there was the
launch of a fourth terrestrial TV broadcaster, Formosa
TV, run by Trong Chai, a DPP heavyweight and veteran
campaigner for both Taiwan's democratization and its
independence from China. Invested by a gaggle of pro-DPP
entrepreneurs, FTV never claimed editorial neutrality.
Rather it attempted to redress the bias in the hugely
one-sided media environment by acting as a window for
the other side.
Another catalyst for change was
the DPP's winning the presidential election in 2000.
With the spoils of victory went the controlling interest
in CTS and TTV. But ownership proved to be somewhat
different from control, as the DPP found out. Both TV
stations were staffed almost exclusively with KMT
members, the journalists, anchors and producers of their
current-affairs programs knew no other editorial policy
other than the promotion of the KMT, and people in
senior positions in the companies had risen up the
ladder in the repressive days of martial law and were
appointed mainly for their ideological soundness.
The DPP's efforts to change this over the last
three years, have brought their share of controversy.
The KMT predictably has accused the government of bias
and appointing its placemen to run the TV companies.
In part this is true; the boards of TTV and CTS
have taken on a notably "green" (the color associated
with the DPP) hue. On the other hand, it is hard to see
why the DPP should be expected to retain KMT placemen.
Of course ideally it would appoint media professionals
irrespective of political hue. But broadcast media have
for so long been treated as political tools in Taiwan
that the pool of ideologically neutral professionals is
extremely shallow. Given that "no fear, no favor"
objectivity has never been valued in Taiwan, there are
few in the business, especially in its upper ranks, who
have cultivated it.
There has also been another
great change from the bad old days, namely the advent of
cable TV. A decade ago the cable business in Taiwan
involved shady operators surreptitiously rigging cable
hookups via telephone polls, down which they sent
material usually pirated off satellite feeds. These days
the business is as professional as anywhere in the
world, providing about 120 channels of everything from
home shopping to Buddhist meditation. It also provides
seven 24-hour all-news channels. There is, in fact, far
more demand for news material than a place of Taiwan's
size can reasonably be expected to generate, the result
being that much of the content of these channels is
boringly repetitive or of peripheral news value.
Nevertheless, the plethora of cable news channels has
added to a diversity of opinion in broadcast media that
a decade ago, when Taiwan was locked in the straitjacket
of the KMT-controlled three terrestrials, was almost
unimaginable.
And while TV might provide the
most significant example of a huge new diversity in
Taiwan's media, there has also been an enormous increase
in radio stations with the granting of a huge number of
new licenses in the past five years. The days when
non-KMT-affiliated broadcasters had to operate
clandestinely while the GIO sent out its goon squads to
try to close the stations down and confiscate equipment
seem far more than just seven years ago.
In this
hugely liberalized environment it seems strange that the
government has suddenly developed a sensitivity about
the cozy relationships between politicians or political
parties and the media. Yet at a meeting of the DPP's
Central Standing Committee on February 11, President
Chen Shui-bian, who is also the party's chairman,
declared that he would free the media from political
influence, both in terms of political parties
controlling media outlets and politicians owning stock
or having senior posts in media companies.
Certainly the relationships are extensive. As
well as the affiliations/ownership of the TV
terrestrials already mentioned, 15 lawmakers, 21 elected
officials and six high-ranking military officers have
extensive TV interests, while 11 legislators and nine
elected officials have stakes in radio stations. Only
the print media are relatively free of politicians,
mostly because the main newspapers are still
family-owned enterprises. Only one newspaper, the
Central Daily News, is owed by a political party, the
KMT, and that is on life support.
President
Chen's aim is to force parties - and here he is
targeting the KMT, which as well as owing CTV also owns
a radio station, the Broadcasting Corp of China - to
divest themselves of their media interests. He also
wants individual politicians out of media ownership or
management, which, of course, particularly affects
Formosa TV.
What should the government do about
its shareholdings in TTV and CTS? The most obvious thing
to do would be simply to sell the stakes. But there has
long been a campaign to turn at least one of the
stations into a public broadcasting channel, providing
more access to ordinary citizens and more diverse
material than the interminable soap operas and tacky
variety shows that are the terrestrials' main fare. The
channel would be financed by a levy on the profits of
the other three terrestrials as well as selling
advertising. The president has now apparently decided
that one of the government's terrestrials should be sold
off and the other converted into a "public TV
corporation" something rather like the odd
neither-private-nor-government status of the British
Broadcasting Corp.
The government's main aim
right now, as expressed by President Chen, is to pass
amendments to the Broadcasting and Television Law in the
current legislative session. Currently there are two
versions of the amendments, one drafted by the GIO that
would limit the holdings of civil servants and elected
politicians and their families in electronic media
organizations, and a tougher version drafted by the DPP
that would ban such holdings altogether and severely
restrict the stake of political parties in such
enterprises.
The president's labeling these
revisions as priority legislation has led to a lot of
showboating and an unseemly controversy. The showboating
has come from both sides as KMT party officials resign
honorary positions at CTV in the interests of the
depoliticization of the media and then demand that DPP
cadres do the same.
Chen was embarrassed to find
that he had some 4,000 Formosa TV shares himself, which,
in a grand gesture, he donated to charity. And, taking
up the KMT's challenge, he has demanded that all DPP
legislators and public officials divest themselves of
their media interests.
This is where the
unseemly argument arises. The DPP's Trong Chai did a
sterling job of building up Formosa TV from a very
financially shaky start into one of the island's more
respected media voices. Despite its DPP backing, it
probably presents a more objective view of the news than
any other channel. Chai is reluctant to quit his company
for what is seen as little more than a re-election
gimmick by the president. If Chen expected Chai to make
his own grand gesture he has been disappointed, since
Chai has departed on a trip to the United States with
his future at Formosa undecided. But it is just as
likely that he will quit the DPP itself as quit Formosa,
adding his name to the now rather embarrassingly long
list of DPP veterans who have left the party because
they can't get on with Chen.
Part of the problem
is one of seniority. Chai, like other DPP grandees, has
a (very dangerous) decade or more experience as a
pro-democracy activist over Chen, who only entered
opposition politics in the 1980s toward the end of the
Chiang family dictatorship. Chai may well bristle at a
Johnny-come-lately to the cause telling him to get out
of what has up to now been his life's principal
achievement for the sake of his own re-election agenda.
But surely, the Western liberal will argue,
getting all these politicians and officials out of
Taiwan's media is important, isn't it? Ten years ago the
answer would have been unequivocally yes. But that was
because the media that existed at the time all sang with
one voice, the KMT's. Today there is a huge diversity in
the electronic media, catering to almost every shade of
political opinion. The discerning TV viewer picks his or
her channel as he or she might pick a newspaper,
according to which seems to have an editorial line more
in harmony with his or her own sympathies. Beyond this
there is a widespread understanding just where on the
political spectrum various media outlets stand, and 50
years of the KMT's attempted mind control have long
enabled many to read between the lines, to take the
kernel of information they want out of a news or
current-affairs program and throw the wrapping of
editorial spin away. The idea that Taiwanese are the
mindless dupes of politically motivated programming is
an insult to their very real sophistication.
Another argument that might be made for the
status quo is that getting politicians out of the media
will probably not result in media any the less partisan.
The satellite TV channel TVBS is free from political
influence but widely seen as being vigorously on the
unificationist side of Taiwan's visceral political
divide - perhaps because of its ambitions to break into
the China market. The print media, ferociously partisan
although family-controlled, also do little to support
the idea that freedom from politicians brings about some
kind of higher objectivity.
And perhaps the best
argument to be made for the comparative unimportance of
what Chen is seeking to do is the willingness of the KMT
to acquiesce. The party has said it is quite wiling to
get rid of its shares in CTV, TTV and BCC with a
nonchalance that has surprised many. But some media
analysts maintain that the KMT has a far more
sophisticated understanding of the media than Chen and
the DPP do; it realizes that the media environment is so
fragmented that the old days of electronic media
hegemony are long gone. The party also realizes that its
ideology is popular enough that it will always find
expression in the media. It does not have to orchestrate
its own support. So, the KMT thinks, let the media
outlets go and rake in the cash for doing so.
There is therefore something distinctly passé
about the president's new drive for media reform. It
seems to be addressing a situation that hasn't really
existed in Taiwan since FTV went on the air in 1998.
Some voters, remembering how bad things used to be,
certainly support the measure. But many others are
baffled; with all that Taiwan has to worry about
economically, the question of media ownership seems to
be an absurd diversion.
A more sophisticated
analysis might suggest that the entire issue is
indicative of desperation on the part of Chen and the
DPP. Chen has kept so few of his election promises - in
the main because of his party's inability to push new
laws through the opposition-controlled legislature -
that he is looking around for something that can be done
quickly, and something the opposition can be shamed into
supporting through the legislature, if only to pad out
his very modest list of achievements as he heads into a
re-election campaign at the end of the year. Hence the
new campaign against political involvement in the media
is not a cry for media freedom so much as a shout of
political desperation.
(©2003 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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