Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Tsai offers a vision of Taiwan’s road ahead

Chen Mei-chin 陳美津

Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has made a remarkable journey: Three years ago, after the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) defeat in both the legislative and presidential elections, she had the unenviable task of trying to get the party out of the doldrums. Today, after winning the primary to become the DPP’s presidential candidate, Tsai has already made history as the nation’s first female presidential candidate.

Next year, she has an excellent chance of beating the incumbent, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Her popularity has soared after winning the DPP presidential primary on April 27. Many opinion polls show that she is neck and neck with Ma. Some polls even show her edging ahead.

Ma’s political playacting will backfire

Taipei Times Editorial

As a result of the rosy pictures and clever slogans that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government frequently feeds the public, more often than not failing to substantiate them, many members of the public now have a clearer grasp of the notion of “politics as performance art.”

A look at the recent act put on by Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) Minister Jennifer Wang (王如玄) in the presence of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), however, has taken it to a new level, as the public played witness to a blatant show of brown-nosing that appears to be prevalent among government officials in the Ma administration.

Taiwan, the Ma Government Wants the Media to Serve it

Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.

Taiwan has recently been facing media problems where the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is using its pan-blue media to run pro-KMT ad-verts as actual news stories. Other pan-blue media are publishing items straight from Xinhua News, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) news organ as if they are regular news. As Freedom House has noted, the press freedom in Taiwan has continued to drop since Ma Ying-jeou became president. Yet, once again, Taiwan faces another situation where it appears that not only does the horse not know how long his face is, but those who serve the horse do not either. In fact they seem to be trying to force the public to accept the fact that the horse really has a short face. What are we talking about? The case involves how a reporter for SET-TV exposed a fake pro-Ma PR scheme. Instead of being praised for good journalism, the reporter and his TV station are being criticized for exposing the truth.

Freedom House lowers Taiwan’s press ranking

Taipei Times

Taiwan continued to drop down the list of countries with a free press, a new global study on press freedom shows.

In a survey released on Monday by the Washington-based think tank Freedom House, Taiwan ranked 48th in the world in press freedom last year. It ranked 47th in 2009 and 43rd in 2008.

The nation scored a total of 24 negative points compared with 23 in 2009 and 20 in each of the previous three years.

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