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Exclusive! Politician gives birth to alien baby
Chen Shui-bian
In the middle of his opening remarks at the International Conference on “After the Third Wave: Problems and Challenges for New Democracies”, hosted by the Taiwan Thinktank here in Taipei, Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian started grousing about the local media, calling them irresponsible and noting that something like only one percent of all Taiwanese trust the media. I looked around at my international colleagues, listening to the translation as I was on a headset, only to see they were looking around at me and everywhere else, with eyebrows cocked, “What the heck is this about?”
Taiwan pres meets the fourth estate. I guess Chen was experiencing a “problem and challenge” for any democracy, not just a new one. Taiwan must be functioning as a free society if the politicians are getting pissed off at the press and complaining about it where ever they can. (I’m sure Canadian journalists in the Ottawa press gallery and Prime Minister Harper will be happy to hear me say that.)
We did get something of an explanation later in the mini-bus on our way to the Grand Hotel from our government information officer—media scandal mongering, attacking the president’s wife, making stuff up, etc.—and it all sounded pretty lively and I really wished I knew more. In our sit-down with the vice-president, Lu Hsui-lien, the topic was brushed on and she echoed the president’s complaint, informing us that she herself had taken a media organization to court for something they had written, and she won. “But I did not ask for money,” she added. From here she made a nice segue into praise for Taiwan’s independent judiciary—good, I thought—and then she speculated that perhaps there should be a law obligating the press to act responsibly—bad bad bad.
Lu Hsui-lien
Obviously Taiwan has a law and she has used it. What is this impulse, even among strong democratic supporters (and if you know anything of Lu’s history, you’ll know she was once imprisoned for five years by the KMT for advocating Taiwanese democracy) to want to control the press?
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