The National Communications Commission has a thankless job.Whenever it takes a decision to discipline an unruly electronic media, it is blamed for partisanship.
Some two months ago, the TVBS cable network aired footage of a video its own reporter shot but claimed it was done by a mobster who threatened to kill his capo on the screen. The lie was bared, and TVBS apologized and fired the reporter and his immediate superior.The NCC reviewed the case and fined the network NT$1 million.The government and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party regarded the NCC disciplinary action as too lenient.They wanted TVBS to discontinue the offensive talk show program, in which the video was shown.To their chagrin, the program has continued.
Now it’s the turn of the pro-government Sanlih Entertainment cable TV network.It broadcast a government-commissioned documentary, “Sixty Years after 2/28,” in March in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the February 28 Incident of 1947.The channel borrowed a scene from another documentary and passed it for one shot in Keelung.The borrowed scene, shot in Shanghai in 1948, shows Kuomintang soldiers executing Chinese communist sympathizers in that city.Sanlih used the Shanghai scene to describe the arrival in Keelung of an infantry division from China and the slaughter that followed.
The fabrication was bared by the United Daily News. Sanlih had to admit to “an honest mistake” and offered a public apology.The NCC reviewed the case and decided to fine Sanlih NT$1 million and require its senior staff to attend lectures on philosophy of journalism lasting no less than eight hours for each.So came the turn of a pro-government media to brand the disciplinary action as too harsh.It blasted the NCC for the partisan decision, which “amounts to an attack on freedom of speech.”
It certainly isn’t an attack on freedom of the press, albeit any member of the press has every right to express how the NCC decision is perceived.Opinions, after all, are free.
As a matter of fact, the NCC treated the two news fabrication cases fairly or at least without partisanship.Weren’t TVBS and Sanlih ordered to pay the same amount in fine? The network has to pay the price for the mistake it made honestly or otherwise.No press workers will ever be intimidated “into a level of perfection that approaches the fantastic” – which indeed is the fear that underlies the allegation of a virtual attack on freedom of the press.
NCC commissioners were appointed by political parties according to their proportional representation in the Legislative Yuan.That doesn’t mean it’s a politically partisan body.At least, the ruling party has its appointees on the NCC just like the opposition Kuomintang.
（本文刊載於96.05.21 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）