SET News and Formosa News have been asked to properly handle viewers’ complaints about their coverage of former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒), after both news channels were accused of giving biased coverage and failing to verify the claims made by guests on political talk shows, the National Communications Commission (NCC) said yesterday.
Commission Chairman Chen Yaw-shyang (陳耀祥) attended a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee to brief lawmakers on the issues related to home shopping channels.
KMT Legislator Hung Meng-kai (洪孟楷) asked Chen if the commission had noticed that some political talk shows spend almost the program focusing on negative coverage about Yen, who is running in a legislative by-election in Taichung’s second electoral district on Jan. 9.
Photo: Liao Yao-tung, Taipei Times
One of the main reasons that the commission rejected CTi News’ license renewal application last year was the channel’s intensive reporting on former Kaohsiung mayor and KMT presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), Hung said.
Hung said he noticed that some of the news channels aired special reports on issues to be voted on in referendums on Saturday last week, with most reports taking positions that favored the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
He gave the commission one month to investigate if news channels had received government funding to produce these special reports three months prior to the referendums.
Chen told lawmakers that the commission had as of yesterday received 58 complaints about media coverage of Yen.
“Taichung’s second electoral district has garnered attention nationwide since voters there recalled former Taiwan Statebuilding Party legislator Chen Po-wei (陳柏維). The commission will not intervene in the production of midday and evening news programs, as well as political talk shows, nor will it dictate the directions of such programs,” Chen said.
Intensive coverage of certain politicians was not the only reason that CTi News’s license was not renewed, Chen said.
“Article 22 of the Satellite Broadcasting Act (衛星廣播電視法) requires satellite channels to have an independent self-regulatory mechanism that accepts audience appeals related to the accuracy, balance and taste of the broadcast content. As such, television stations should first handle the complaints themselves,” he said.
Stakeholders involved in news events have the right to report to the commission what they think is inaccurate media coverage about them, Chen said.
Media outlets, on the other hand, must not deny their requests for a commensurate opportunity to respond and must not ignore requests for corrections, as per the act, he said.
Forty-five of the 58 complaints were filed by Yen himself, while the other 13 were filed by viewers, NCC Department of Broadcasting and Content Affairs Director Huang Wen-che (黃文哲) said.
“Mr Yen complained that the news and commentaries did not adhere to the fact-verification principle in the act. We have examined some of the content and asked him to be more specific about allegations against him that he deemed to be false,” Huang said.
Last week, the commission notified SET News and Formosa News that their ethics committees must address concerns about biased coverage of politicians, Huang said.
In other news, the commission confirmed that it has since Monday received nine complaints about media coverage of Taiwanese-American singer Wang Leehom (王力宏) and his divorce, with six of them saying that television stations devoted too much time to a domestic dispute.
The other three complaints were about television stations’ alleged contraventions of the Protection of Children and Youths Welfare and Rights Act (兒童及少年福利與權益保障法), as they used photographs of Wang’s children from Instagram in their broadcasts, it said.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching