KMT politicizes the News?

Taiwan News has another one of its hard-hitting editorials on what it sees as the KMT's latest swipes at independent journalism in Taiwan...

A case in point is Ma's May 20th statement that 'Taiwan's democracy should not be marred by illegal eavesdropping, arbitrary justice or political interference in the media or electoral institutions."

In blatant violation of this commitment not to politically interfere in the media, the KMT government and party has executed a three-pronged campaign to impose political control over three publically owned but autonomously operated news media, namely Radio Taiwan International, the Central News Agency and the Taiwan Public Television Service.

Although RTI and the CNA were formerly KMT party enterprises, these two news media and the newer TPS are legally independent public corporations. While partial funding is provided by the Legislative Yuan under the Government Information Office's budget, neither the GIO or the legislature have the right to directly interfere in management operations or news coverage.

"Ma's May 20th statement" is of course his inaugural speech. It is looking like everything Ma said the government shouldn't be doing, from political prosecutions to creating instability in the Taiwan Strait -- is exactly what it is doing -- in other words, the speech was a road map. Taiwan News continues...

While the former Democratic Progressive Party government was by no means innocent of attempts to indirectly influence the direction of media operations, RTI, CNA and TPS were operated by news professionals and free of direct interference by officials of the former DPP government and frequently had programming or articles critical of ex-president Chen Shui-bian and his administration.

Media observers had hoped that the KMT government would respect existing contracts of board members, senior management and editorial staff and, based on Ma's promise not to allow political interference in media, exercise self-restraint and respect the need to respect news autonomy and professional ethics.

As Johnny Neihu noted last week in his satirical column in the Taipei Times (emphasis in original):

As unreliable as my aging memory can be, I do recall a time only a few years ago when Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) hot shots were slamming government publications for — yep, you guessed it — making the government look less than perfect.

Take former DPP legislator and current party aide Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴). Way back on April 2, 2003, about a year before former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) re-election, the Great Green Hope for the Youth Vote stood up in a legislative committee meeting and attacked the then-monikered Taipei Review (originally Free China Review, now Taiwan Review).

This august journal had the audacity to publish an article by US professor and Taiwan specialist Shelley Rigger that said — gasp! — the DPP would struggle to get re-elected in the presidential election.

The following day, our very own Taipei Times captured the moment in all of its excruciating detail.

“[Hsiao] said Rigger’s article gave readers a negative impression of the DPP and should not have had appeared in a government-sponsored journal.

Hsiao [said] a government-sponsored publication should not be predicting that it will be difficult for the ruling party to continue to hold onto power after next year’s presidential election.

She said such an analysis should not have appeared in a government-sponsored publication in the first place, adding the article might damage the government’s image.”

Let’s not quibble over Hsiao’s inability to distinguish between the government of the day and her party (The irony! The irony!). I would prefer to point out that no DPP tentpegs of the day publicly stood up for the Taipei Review.

There were other cases as well. Regrettably the only model for party-state relations the DPP ever had was the KMT..... meanwhile the Taiwan News get to the three major recent changes that it says have basically corrupted the news:

On September 30, RTI Chairman Cheng You and six other board directors resigned to protest the GIO's demand to "correct" its programming after a PRC state-owned newspaper cited one pro-Taiwan talk show program as evidence that RTI was controlled by "the independence faction" and criticizing both Ma and China.

News analyses from pro-China media in Hong Kong and Macao state that the "recovery" of RTI by the KMT was performed to pave the way for ensuring a blackout to China of likely protests against the upcoming visit to Taipei of Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits Chairman Chen Yunlin, Beijing's chief negotiator with Taiwan, to Taipei.

In addition, the KMT-controlled Legislative Yuan imposed indirect control over TPS last week by expanding its board of supervisors, which has the power to nominate directors of the TPS board for nomination by the premier, from nine members to 13 with the appointment of four KMT legislators as "upstanding social personages."

On Oct. 5, the Campaign for Media Reform and the Taiwan Media Watch issued a joint statement slamming the action as trampling on Article 13 of the Public Television Law, which mandates that the Legislature should name respected media professionals, academics or respected social leaders as supervisors.

The two media reform groups added that the move "displays the KMT's total lack of respect for the independent spirit of the public television system."

Perhaps most serious was the appointment of former Ma campaign spokesman Lo Chih-chiang as CNA deputy president on Sept. 30, a move which transparently "politicizes" the formerly impartial state news agency. In an open letter released yesterday, CNA Deputy Editor in Chief Chuang Feng-chia announced his resignation to protest this move and numerous recent examples of censorship of CNA news articles deemed to be "unfavorable to the president, the Cabinet or the GIO."

The importance of the CNA should not be underestimated -- it has been a key source of news for English newspapers and foreign media in Taiwan. Its politicization means that an important news source that had previously been relatively balanced is now....lost.

Ma's announcement this week in Japan that China was part of the ROC should also be viewed in this context of slumping democratic freedoms -- rule over China was for years one of the justifications for many odious KMT practices, such as preserving the legislature that had ruled in China for years afterwards. These are not isolated events but pieces of a larger trend.

Good-bye free Taiwan, we hardly knew ya...

[Taiwan]