The quality and sustainability of Taiwan's hard-won democracy is now being increasingly threatened by invasive "embedded advertizing" and "censorship without borders" from the authoritarian People's Republic of China.
Since President Ma Ying-jeou took office on May 20, 2008, Taiwan's ratings for news freedom have deteriorated steady, as shown by the plunge in Taiwan's ranking from 32nd in 2008 to 47th this year in the annual reviews of global news freedom by the New York-based Freedom House.
One of the reasons cited by Freedom House for the erosion has been the use by the Ma administration of huge amounts of taxpayer funds to engage in "embedded advertising" or promotion or propaganda of government policies packaged as "news" stories or features.
During the campaign in the run-up to the March 20, 2008 presidential election, Ma declined to sign pledge to end embedded marketing, but formally stated after winning the poll that his KMT administration would end the practice, a pledge which the president has failed to fulfill.
As a result of embedded marketing and the frequent use of "news" stories to engage in marketing by public as well as private sector interests, the credibility of the Taiwan news media has fallen to its lowest level since the lifting of the four decade long KMT-imposed martial law decree in July 1987.
Media reform organizations such as the Association of Taiwan Journalists, Media Watch and the Campaign for Media Reform continue to press President Ma to fulfill his promise to cease government "embedded advertising."
However, an even greater threat to news freedom, freedom of expression and the credibility of our news media is looming on the horizon as the Chinese Communist Party- ruled PRC, which has deployed over 1,500 missiles and other offensive forces opposite our shores, is now actively exploiting the opportunity posed by "cross-strait reconciliation" to buy influence in print and broadcast media in Taiwan.
For the hostile CCP dictatorship to be able to directly buy media coverage in a democratic Taiwan would have been unthinkable during the martial law period when the KMT was rigidly anti-communist and committed to "recovering the mainland" from the "Chicom bandits."
But now this very phenomenon is taking place under our noses.
A stark example of this new type of "cross-strait interchange" occurred earlier this month when PRC Fujian Provincial Governor Huang Xiaojin visited Taiwan accompanied by a massive delegation of officials and businessmen.
Two KMT - friendly daily newspapers, one of which is owned by a Taiwan business tycoon based in the PRC, used a huge amount of space to cover Huang's arrival on the following day, while Taiwan's state-owned Central Daily News carried a daily "news" diary detailing Huang's activities and thus publicizing virtually his every move and utterance.
Converging unfreedom
Moreover, expansive "special sections" welcomed the Fujian governor's visit that offered fulsome praise of Fujian's "progress" but lacked any mention of shortcomings or any balanced appraisal of the investment risks and exaggerated the economic impact of his "procurement" mission.
Another example was a full page section in a pro-KMT newspaper yesterday on Shandong Province, which touted its "outstanding location and rich resources" and "improving competitiveness" but lacked a single word of balanced commentary.
Such embedded advertising, which appears on a daily basis in print and broadcast media, is a very thin fig leaf away from blatantly transgressing the prohibition against PRC political advertising in Taiwan media contained in the statute governing cross-strait relations.
Nevertheless, the Mainland Affairs Council, which is responsible for enforcement of this statute, has not uttered a syllable of criticism of such practices.
The apparently eager acceptance of such covert political advertisements from a hostile power manifests the degeneration of news media standards in Taiwan and stands as another shocking example of the "convergence" between authoritarian China and democratic Taiwan that has visibly accelerated since the KMT regained power two years ago.
Moreover, the passive acceptance in our society of embedded advertising by the KMT government and the enthusiastic copying of this practice by the CCP regime exposes an even more frightening trend to take our hard-won democratic freedoms for granted.
Claims by KMT sycophants that Taiwan's "mature civil society" should not fear the PRC's "united front" media offensive ignore the reality that both the CCP regime's intimidating "censorship without borders" and its proactive invasive "embedded advertising" in Taiwan news media are being consciously carried out by an authoritarian state precisely to undermine the democratic freedoms that our "mature civil society" now possesses.
Combined with the declining news freedom in Taiwan itself under the KMT administration, the PRC's invasion of embedded advertising threatens to deprive Taiwan's 23 million people of the capability to exercise their fundamental human rights of the freedom of expression and our right to freely choose our future.
As a first step, President Ma should instruct his KMT government to respect his pledge and cease the use of taxpayer funds for covert political "embedded advertising" and instruct the MAC to enforce the ban on PRC embedded advertisements and any direct or indirect investment or involvement in Taiwan news media.
Source: Taiwan News Online - Editorial 2010/05/18
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