Taiwan’s Public Television Service (PTS) may not be able to issue paychecks to its employees until October. It turns out that an attempt by lawmakers in the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee (ECC) to boycott the budget of the Government Information Office (GIO) led to a freeze of half the annual NT$900 million (US$29 million) budget that the GIO allocates each year to the PTS Foundation.
After the transfer of power to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the ECC lifted its boycott of other GIO budgets, but has not followed suit with the PTS budget, which remains frozen.
While the legislature has the right to review and freeze budgets, legislators are using the PTS to sharpen their swords by continuing to freeze a budget that has been legally allocated. No matter how legitimate their reasons, this sets a bad example of political interference in the media.
A comprehensive survey on the sources of funding for public television services in other countries shows that licensing fees, government allocations and advertising income are the major sources of funds.
For example, in the UK, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Japan, the main source of funding for public TV is licensing fees collected from every household with a television. In Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and Taiwan, on the other hand, government allocations are the major source of funding; and in Spain, advertising income accounts for the majority.
Some other countries provide funding from supplementary taxes such as an electricity tax surcharge in Turkey, a tobacco tax surcharge in Thailand, and an income tax surcharge in the Netherlands. Sources of funding have also changed. For instance, New Zealand and the Netherlands abolished the collection of licensing fees from the public in 1988 and 2000 respectively, and switched to other approaches to fund public TV.
No matter where funding comes from, most countries have made laws to guarantee that it increases in step with movements in the consumer price index. The thinking behind this approach is simply a wish to guarantee the stability of public TV without interference from a country’s government or legislature.
However, the fact that in Taiwan the legislature has blocked the budget and then refused to unfreeze it constitutes a practice of inappropriate meddling.
Some reasons why legislators have yet to unfreeze the annual budget for the PTS is because they allegedly received internal letters questioning how the PTS uses its facilities. The letters accuse the public television station of discarding equipment before it should be written off. However, the legislature cannot use these claims as an excuse for keeping the budget frozen.
The legislature has the right and the duty to supervise the PTS in order to promote beneficial activities and eliminate irregularities and to maintain the healthy development of the PTS. However, it cannot intervene in and obstruct the independent and normal operations of the PTS in any way, and, more importantly, it should not have frozen the budget in the first place.
The move begs the question: How can the PTS continue to carry out its responsibilities as a public medium to supervise the government and the legislature without being paid? The legislature should unfreeze the PTS budget immediately and complete the amendment for the Public Broadcasting Act (公共廣播電視法) to help the station grow stronger rather than use supervision as an excuse to strangle it.
Lo Shih-hung is an associate professor of communications and chairman of the Department of Communications at National Chung Cheng University.
Translated by Ted Yang
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