Gangster Threatening Footage and Reflecions on Media Environment

出自Taipedia

On March 28th, TVBS, the TV station which has been long mocked as "TV Bull Shit", broadcasted a footage that called the attention to the society. The footage, which filmed gangster Chou Cheng-pao threatening his former gangster boss with guns, was later broadcasted by other cable TV, making a spectacle of Chou’s appearance in the screen of almost every news channel. However, not until the investigation did the police find that the footage was actually shot by TVBS reporter Shi Chen-kang. It turned out that the footage was a pseudo news made up by the reporter and the gangster.

Because media chaos has been a long-term phenomenon in Taiwan, the footage caused the outrage of the society right after the public knew it was a made-up one. Muser, who wrote three articles to scold TVBS, pointed out that it was not the first time TVBS invented news. He indicated that the bias reports in daily life were more difficult to cope with than the unusual pseudo news:

After the invented news of removing ducks’ feathers with tar, today TVBS has another scandal of making up the news featuring a gangster’s threatening with firearms. Were it not for the police’s investigation because the news is concerned with criminal law, the truth that this news is invented would not be disclosed. Not to mention those news which are not concerned with criminal law and are never examined by the public, what would you do with them when it is hard to make the reporters responsible for those news?

Seeing the mistake of TVBS, other media blurred the footage immediately and criticized TVBS for inventing the news. But such a behavior of hitting TVBS when it was down caused the sniff of many people, long-term media observer Benla said angrily:

It is not righteous for other media to judge TVBS at all. Yesterday they all followed TVBS and broadcasted the same footage of Chou, and they blur it today. Nothing can be more shameful than this!

Bad Mouth, the reporter in PTS, was soothed by the modest decision of PTS. Instead of following the trend to show the footage, PTS reprimanded news stations for broadcasting it. She advised other news stations not to hit TVBS when it was down, because “is it not all of you who got the footage and helped the gangster to threaten others by broadcasting it?”

Facing the critique all around, TVBS decided to accept it without defending themselves. The call-in TV show Speaking on Your Mind at 2100 hosted by the general manager Lee-Tao(李濤)prolonged its runtime from one hour to three hours, receiving all the scolds without interrupting until the audiences hung up the phone themselves. They even arranged news director Pan Tzu-yin(潘祖蔭) appearing in the show to be blamed. Sarcastically, the self-criticizing of TVBS turned out to make a dramatic rise in the show’s audience rating, which provoked jeers from other people. Tenz said deridingly, “What a genius to condemn its own employee on one hand while earning both audience rating and advertising fee on the other hand!” The cartoonist Mr. Zeng drew a series of comics for it called What the hell? Everything’s gone after the apology?

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NCC(National Communications Commission), which is in charge of cable television, made a punishment of fining TVBS and TVBS-N each for one million dollars(total sum of two million dollars) and asked TVBS to replace its general manager Lee-Tao(李濤). The general manager ended up resigning and expressed in his announcement that he hoped his resignation could “stop vicious attacks on TVBS.” Instead of bringing forth people’s mercy as it was meant to, his statement provoked more critiques. As to the punishment of NCC, some thought it overdone while others consider it not enough. Both of media-reform NGO, Media Watch and Campaign for Media Reform, criticized that the punishment was “insufficient but over-exaggerated at the same time.”

They indicated that the supervising office should not interfere with internal affairs of the media, and to require an alteration on personnel matters was merely a stopgap measure which could not solve the structural problem of dog-eat-dog competition in this business. Besides, the scandal revealed the loophole and deficiency of the relevant law. Responding to these problems, NCC should make amendments to the law as soon as possible and take the blunder of TVBS into consideration when changing broadcasting license in the future, rather than exclude it from evaluation and issue the license since the penalty is carried out, just like they used to do.

Compared with the harsh attacks on TVBS higher officers, the two former reporters fired in this event received many support from other colleagues. Having been a journalist for seven to eight years, An Ping Ke (安平客)wrote an article “We Can Do Nothing” to lament the severe working environment of media, where reporters have to betray their souls in order to earn a living. To attract everybody’s attention, distortion of the news becomes the SOP (standard operating procedure) for news processing. In such a working environment, what should reporters do when all the media become another “TV Bull Shit,” and the only difference is that whether they get penalty or not by bullshitting either big issues or small ones? Responding to this concern, the answer of An Ping Ke is, “We can do nothing.” In his blog, Benla quoted a remark from a former TVBS reporter,who thought that these two reporters did make an unbearable mistake, but at the same time they also contributed lots of exclusives to the company since they are reporters for such a long time. “The company gets benefits by broadcasting those exclusives, but when he (Shi) gets into trouble, where is the company? Does it pay the bail and hire a lawyer for him? I don’t think so. However, it is the news values internalized by the company that makes him(Shi) violate the news ethics,” as the former reporter said.

In “Lee Should Apologize to Shi”(李濤，該向史鎮康道歉), press reporter HJB quoted a line from the film Infernal Affairs(無間道), “If I can choose to be a good people, why being a bad guy?” He pointed out that the structural factor which sank media workers into depravity was “the anxiety driven by market competition, which gnaws media workers’ insistence on news ethics.” In letters-to-the-editor column, senior reporter Caroline Lin (林照真)also indicated that advertising system was to blame for such a media chaos. She said that the overcrowded TV channels in Taiwan and the extremely low audience rating, accompanied with improper advertising system, together shape a distorted media environment where news stations are subject to audience rating which the advertising fee is paid upon. Attracting the audience’s attention becomes the top principle prior to the quality of the news. When audience rating rules and producing sensational news is the easiest way to pursue it, journalists can do nothing but slaved by audience rating, sacrificing their dignity as well as professional ideology.

As audience, quite a few of internet users decided to use their own strength to improve media environment. The net users in News100 made a list of advertisers with phone numbers who paid to Speaking on Your Mind at 2100 on March 28th and 29th. Aiming at showing the anger of audience, they launched a campaign to boycott the advertisers and protest on the phone. Besides, adopting the idea of the previous activity “Rejecting Bad Media, Count Me In,” Tenz started a campaign “Articulations: Skip News Channels Together,” in which he and other net users, in order to boycott bad media by refusing to see it, worked together to teach people how to set TV in the mode of automatically skipping particular channels.

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The scandal of pseudo news caused a big turmoil in the society. However, as the media reformers suggested, it might be another turning point:

This scandal is not a sole occurrence in the society but an epitome of wretched media culture in Taiwan. However, owing to this event, if news stations can reflect on themselves; NCC can properly exert its authority of supervising; the reporters are prompted to unifying themselves to fight against the unreasonable demands from the boss, and the public can thus fight against media violence together, then this scandal, which is a shameful event for all of us in the history of press, is going to be a chance for improving our media environment.