For
most of this month, it seemed as if only three people existed for the media in
Taiwan.
There was Kawashima Makiyo, the celebrity who
beat up a taxi driver in a drunken rage; Fong Fei-fei, the 1970s singer who
died last month; and Jeremy Lin, the Taiwanese-American basketball wunderkind.
For three weeks, they dominated the local newspapers and television channels.
As for Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping's
visit to the United States, the crisis in Syria, the second bailout of Greece
and other international news? All relegated to obscurity - if mentioned at all.
The Taiwanese media has long been known for
its obsession with the domestic and the sensational, but the current frenzy was
widely deemed extreme even by the usual standards.
More than 20 people complained to the media
watchdog, the National Communications Commission (NCC), prompting its chief Su
Herng and Interior Minister Lee Hong-yuan to appeal to the media for restraint.
The skewed coverage has also raised questions about the state of Taiwan's
media, with some wondering if the intense competition here has improved or
worsened its quality.
"The Taiwanese have very little
understanding of public affairs," noted communications lecturer Kuang
Chung-shiang at National Chung Cheng University. "We have many media
outlets but our world is very small."
It all started with Makiyo, the
Japanese-Taiwanese singer who, along with her boyfriend Tomoyori Takateru,
assaulted a taxi driver on February 2 after he insisted that Makiyo fasten her
seat belt. The middle-aged cabby ended up in intensive care and the
27-year-old's nightmare began. For 10 days, the media hounded the singer and
her boyfriend.
Every last detail about Makiyo was covered,
from her rise to stardom as a teenage model and her penchant for the nightlife,
to her alleged sexual fetishes, and the background of her boyfriend and
parents.
All these were repeated ad nauseum on news
channels. Political talk shows jumped in. One programme even re-enacted the
assault, complete with a judo manoeuvre that her boyfriend was said to have
used on his victim. It irritated many.
"Give us a break, and give that poor girl
a break," two receptionists muttered after overhearing this reporter
mention Makiyo in a phone call.
On February 10, prosecutors charged the singer
and her boyfriend with causing grievous bodily harm but this did little to slow
the media down - until February 13, when the death of Fong was announced.
The popular singer quickly replaced Makiyo in
the spotlight, as readers and viewers were flooded with endless reports,
commentaries, obituaries and concert footage, leading more than one Taiwanese
to remark wryly, "Fong saved Makiyo".
A few days later, Fong-mania gave way to
'Linsanity', when the 23-year-old basketball player - whose parents migrated to
the US from Taiwan - made NBA history by leading his team, the New York Knicks,
to seven straight wins.
"When there's only one item in one hour
of news on TV, when the prime-time political talk show also talks about
basketball... it made me laugh until tears came," recalled commentator Wu
Nien-jen.
Many say the crux of the problem is excessive
competition. Since being liberalised in 1990, Taiwan's media industry has
become among the most saturated in the world, said professor Kuang. The
island's 23 million people have access to more than 100 TV channels by 80
broadcasters, scores of newspapers and thousands of magazines. Fifteen TV
channels and five major newspapers cover hard news alone.
The result: Excessive coverage of domestic
news - and sometimes, right down to the mundane. On a slow news day, it is not
uncommon to read an 'exclusive' about a man finding shoots growing on a tomato
in his fridge, or to see a reporter compare different types of sunscreen.
'International news', meanwhile, tends to be
video clips mined from YouTube, reports of quirky Japanese inventions, some
reproductions of news from CNN, and celebrity gossip. More often than not,
serious reports end up tucked away in the inside pages of the main newspapers,
and barely figure on television.
The other victim of competition appears to be
quality: The industry is littered with instances of obsessive - and sometimes
dubious - journalism.
When the teenage daughter of television star
Pai Ping-ping was kidnapped in 1997, journalists trailed the family everywhere,
even to the ransom drop. "Were you helping me or hurting me?" it led
Pai to ask at a press conference.
Her daughter was later found dead.
Kuang believes competition should be limited
in Taiwan's media by trimming the number of players and restricting newcomers.
But the NCC is not keen for the government to
take an active role. NCC spokesman Ho Chi-sen pointed out that Taiwan's media
is one of the freest in Asia: "The government cannot infringe on freedom
of speech and freedom of the press. We hope that public opinion keeps the media
in check."
And public opinion, it seems, has made its
irritation clear. When a senior political reporter at China Television System
recently did a parody of a North Korean news anchor announcing the death of
leader Kim Jong Il, Taiwanese jaded by their own media's antics raised an
outcry, forcing the reporter, MsLiang Fang-yu, to resign.
A few days later, Liang admitted to being
caught up in the madness of her trade. "I was a frog in a slow-boiling pot
of water," she wrote on Facebook. "The pressure for ratings was my
undoing."
Lee Seok Hwai
The Straits Times
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