Thursday, January 25, 2007

Info Blockage in Taiwan

Some people in Taiwan are short sighted. I don't blame them.

I feel that there is something similar between Taiwan and communist China: Both have communist controlled news media. Some people say that we have great freedom of journalism, we to an extant, yes, the Taiwanese government doesn't control the media; yet it neither
regulates either. Some news company here are partly owned by the Chinese government (Such as that T**S TV news station, which is a company from Hong Kong, which is acquired by the Chinese communists). Some others are just plain biased in their view and reports what ever the Chinese like. So what's the problem here, and what does that has to do with info blockage?

Obviously, these media report from a Chinese point of view. They believe that China is the greatest, and despises all other countries. Other then local Taiwan news, they focus on Chinese events, squeezing out the news from all other countries. Thus, the Taiwanese who only watch TV and/or read Newspapers as their source of news are ignorant of all that's happening else where in the world. Even worse, some news media give people the illusion that "Main land China IS the world" (A concept originating from the old days of emperors when they used "Under the sky / 天下" as an acronym for the Chinese empire, and saw everywhere else as irreverent places of the edge of the world). I know some Taiwanese companies are saying that they want to enter the global market, but instead only went to China, a clear implementation of this illusion.

More over, our notorious news media has a structure of reports consisting of over 70% fiction. They report everything thats "likely, yet not true", sometimes they make the linkages them selves, such as in "it's not hard to imply from this...". But worst of all, they sometime even "act" out fake news, such as that reporter who played with the fire hydrants in several high speed railway stations, claiming that it's too easy to release the alarms "by accident".

So, living in Taiwan, we really should be careful of what we believe. Choose the news source that has less fake news, and to know about the world, read foreign news sites on the web, such as BBC or New York Times. One advantage we have over real Chinese is that we have un restricted internet access, so we are not restricted to the dumb ass fiction news nor the Chinese propaganda.

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