Government Information Office (GIO) Minister Su Jun-pin (蘇俊賓) reaffirmed yesterday the government’s opposition to placement marketing — a practice through which advertisements are passed off as news — adding that the agency would look into allegations that several government agencies had given money to media outlets in exchange for news coverage promoting the government’s policies and performance.
“There are suspicions. We will find out whether [the accusations] are true,” Su said.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily on Friday published a story giving examples of placement marketing by the government.
The story quoted an article by Chu Shu-chuan (朱淑娟), a former journalist at the Chinese-language United Daily News, to highlight what it said was part of government attacks on freedom of the press.
In an article titled “When The Press Discovers Truth No More” posted on a blog about environmental issues on May 5, the veteran journalist lamented a growing tendency within the news community of seeing government as a source of money in return for stories that cast government policies and officials in a favorable light.
Chu’s article referred to stories by newspaper “C” — believed to be the Chinese-language China Times — and a story by newspaper “U” — believed to be the United Daily News — published ahead of Labor Day in which Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) was praised for her efforts to reduce unemployment. Both stories were published with the bylines of the reporters covering the CLA beat. The China Times labeled the story as a feature, while the United Daily News ran it as hard news.
When owners of media outlets blur the distinctions between news coverage and advertisement, they lose their credibility and could lose readers, Chu wrote.
Other examples cited by the Apple Daily included a story published by the Chinese-language United Daily Evening News on Tuesday that featured an elderly man expressing gratitude to the government for subsidizing his false teeth and three half pages published in the China Times on May 20 that promoted the policies advocated by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Council of Hakka Affairs and the Ministry of Finance, among others.
The Apple Daily said that Minister of the Interior Liao Liou-yi (廖了以) had once expressed anger at the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) after discovering that the paper had added a note in a story about government subsidies for false teeth, saying it was a purchased advertisement rather than a news story.
“Why make it an ad when what I wanted was for the public to see it as news?” Liao was quoted by the Apple Daily as saying.
Su yesterday said the GIO would look into the allegations.
“Government agencies can promote their policies in newspapers as long as it is done advertisement-style. What is not allowed, however, is for the information to be presented as news,” Su said.
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