Biased news coverage a disgrace to the country

By Lillian Wang

Sunday, Dec 16, 2007, Page 8

'This coverage was a textbook case of using selective exposure to hide the facts.'

THE DAY BEFORE the inscription dazhong zhizheng was taken down from the main gate at the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall, an ETTV cameraman was run over by a truck. The whole country could see on the news how the cameraman was dragged in under the truck, while his colleagues cried as they filmed and photographed the incident. This shows the danger that journalists face, and how they are often torn between humanitarian and professional ethics. It's very distressing. But off-screen lurks a tragic reality.

Reading each of the four major national newspapers on Dec. 8, three of them had a picture of the terrible scene and the badly injured cameraman on the front page. Such stark news images being violently pushed by the media is precisely what the French post-modernist Jean Baudrillard mentioned in his writings: It was a sensational pleasure derived from images, just like the case of the dead in the mass grave in Timisoara in Romania.

The brave and professional actions of a cameraman on the front lines was treated in the same fashion as the bloody, sensational images produced when crocodile bit off the arm of a veterinarian at a zoo in Kaohsiung. Tragedies and serious accidents like this are hard to bear for a responsible news industry.

Upon opening newspapers, we were stunned to see that they published strong denouncements of this violent incident inside. Seeing this misplaced hypocrisy, we can't help asking whether the media outlets that use media violence and write up the misfortunes of a fellow journalist are really qualified to denounce the troublemakers who instigated this accident.

If they really want to denounce someone, why don't they look into the background of the troublemakers, or thoroughly investigate the motives behind the accident? Isn't faithfully reporting the actual state of affairs the most important work that people in the news industry do?

Going back to the TV news of the cameraman's accident, even though some channels pixilated the footage of the injured man, the public had to witness yet again how some channels sensationalized this tragic incident to obscure the core facts.

First, they intentionally misled viewers by proclaiming on their news scrollers that the truck driver had a pan-green background -- without checking to see if this was true.

Second, when it became clear that the driver was assisting the campaign of a pro-unification politician, some channels tried to obscure the facts by saying on their scrollers that the driver had a record of attacking Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou -- omitting the fact that the reasons for those attacks was that the driver believed Ma was not pro-unification enough.

This coverage was a textbook case of using selective exposure to hide the facts. Does this do justice to the professionalism of a cameraman who took serious risks to film a news event?

The top managers who ordered that news should be reported in this manner should be ashamed of themselves considering the risks their frontline workers face.

Lillian Wang is an associate professor of journalism at National Chengchi University.

Translated by Anna Stiggelbout