Unbiased... Reserved... Nontitillating... aren't words you often hear used to describe the Taiwanese media. Newspapers feature, as o...
Unbiased... Reserved... Nontitillating... aren't words you often hear used to describe the Taiwanese media. Newspapers feature, as often as not, no-holds-barred political slugfests, with a number of papers clearly supportive of one political camp and mercilessly skewering the other. Rupert Murdoch might not understand the language, but he'd feel right at home collecting the cheques. Magazines with scantily clad sexpots in suggestive poses can be found everywhere from the backs of taxicabs to dentists' waiting rooms. Sex sells, and magazines, newspapers, and TV news programs grow more vapid and titillating by the year. Reporters on the Taiwan news beat are known - and feared - for being aggressive (Sir Elton John had a few words for the Taiwanese media on a recent trip, but we shouldn't reprint them in a family oriented guidebook). And they're crafty as well, so much so that its likely that any Taiwanese politician or celebrity thinks twice before removing their clothes anywhere but in the privacy of their own homes. Taiwan's media is free, not merely in the sense of being neither government censored nor controlled, but free in the purest 'free for all' sense. This is what a couple of decades of change brings after the near half-century of state-controlled propaganda the Taiwanese endured under martial law.
Over on the Mainland, the Communist Party justifies censorship and government control of the press by warning that a Taiwan-style free press will lead to spiritual pollution and moral decay; bollocks. Though Taiwan currently has one of the most sensationalistic medias in the world, most Taiwanese are about as personally lascivious as a Norman Rockwell painting.
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