Derechos y obligaciones

From the previous historical review o f the general public’s media participatory practices in Taiwan, we can see that Taiwanese government’s telecom policies have also played a significant role here. For example, the promotion o f the BBS obviously related to the government’s policy o f promoting Internet use in colleges. This policy later had some impact on online participatory culture in Taiwan. WRETCH, the most popular blog hosting website mentioned above was, to a certain extent, developed in a university under the encouragement umbrella o f the government’s Internet policy. As my previous discussion has indicated, official power in Taiwan set up different digital policies to encourage the general Internet users to use the online medium to practice their citizenship, in other words, to become e-citizens.

The e-citizen vision is based on two perspectives. Firstly, being able to access the Internet has been seen as a basic skill for citizens who live in the information age; and secondly, media performance in Taiwan in the past decade has been strongly criticized as the public’s media participation is used by official power as a means o f media reform.

Various government reports have considered the Taiwanese government’s intentions to articulate Internet usage, citizenship and ‘deliberative democracy’ together (National Think Tank Online, 2006). As for deliberative democracy, the National Taiwan Think-tank, an official policy-making institution, defines it as a sort o f democracy which ‘entails the idea that all citizens should be eligible to participate in collective decision-making, which should be conducted in a rational m anner’ (National Taiwan Think-tank Online, 2006:online). By stating deliberative democracy as meaning ‘all

16 Later Chinatimes.com also opened it blog space to the public but Chinatimes.com seems to prefer blogs written by ‘famous persons’ and usually puts their blogs on the front page.

citizens can participate in the government’s decision-making’, the Think-tank suggests public participation in policy-making as the ideal form o f democracy, especially in the context o f Taiwan. As the policy making institution indicates:

In the course o f Taiwan’s democratic development, social divergence has occurred because o f a difference in political standpoints. Some have wondered whether Taiwan's democratic transformation has stalled in a bottleneck... [The] idea o f deliberative democracy...rebuilds people's trust in the democratic system and passion for participation with the ultimate goal o f deepening Taiwan's democratic practices (National Taiwan Think-tank Online, 2006:online).

Online (Internet) space, from the government’s point o f view, is one o f the ideal

‘platform s’ for citizens to practice deliberative democracy. Under this scenario,

different government sectors propose their plans to foster e-citizenship and deliberative democracy. For instance, in 2004, the Taiwanese Department o f Health held a

‘consensus conference’ that invited ‘citizens’ to participate in the discussion on how to solve the National Health Insurance (NHI) financial crisis. The activity was also sponsored by Yam.com, a portal website, by providing a blog space and inviting ‘citizen journalists’ to report the conference. The design o f the conference originated from the

design o f citizen meetings in some western countries, with the purpose o f gathering the public’s opinions.

The government’s ‘top-down’ action to encourage people to participate in

deliberative democracy also articulates media reform in Taiwan. As I mentioned earlier, the Taiwanese government has been urged to take aggressive action to enact media

reform due to the poor quality o f media performance. After coming to power, the DPP government claimed that Taiwan would need to develop citizen journalism to train citizen journalists in the name o f media reform. Additionally, the government’s

intervention also involved political purposes. During the D PP’s eight-year (2000-2008) period in power, the relationship between the government and the media was always tense. In particular, in 2004, the DPP candidate, Chen Shui-Bian, won the presidential election against the rival KMT by only 0.2% of the votes. Many media that supported the KMT questioned the legitimacy o f the 2004 presidential election and held an antagonistic position toward the DPP government. News reports and comments on these media usually impugned the DPP government as incapable and corrupt. The DDP government, by contrast, advocated that all these accusations showed the bias o f the pro-KMT m edia (all these media are called ‘Pan-Blue’ media because KMT use the colour blue to represent their party) in attempting to besmirch the government and bring the old political force (the KMT) back to office. Under these circumstances, several influential conflicts occurred. In 2000 and 2002, the District Prosecutor’s Office searched the offices o f the China Times Evening News and Next Magazine on suspicion o f violating national security; and in 2006, the NCC (National Communication

Commission) refused to renew the licence o f TVBS on the grounds that the television company received investment from the PRC17. Coincidentally, most o f these media are Pan-Blue media.

In order to countervail the pressure from the Pan-Blue media, the DPP government started to promote citizen journalism in Taiwan. Yang Kai-Cheng (2006) uses the citizen journalism activities promoted by the National Youth Commission (NYC) as an example to analyze official pow er’s top-down model o f citizen journalism. He suggests

17 The Taiwanese government still bans mainland China capital from investing in media businesses in Taiwan. However, the TVBS case is that the company has capital from Hong Kong, it does not come directly come from China, and this seems acceptable under the law.

that, based on N Y C ’s logic, the media should provide ‘spaces’ for public debates, but the commercial media in Taiwan do not fulfil this expectation. Therefore, the

government sector should help Taiwan construct an ideal ‘public sphere’ for public debates by supporting the development o f blog space. Under this circumstance, citizen journalism or blog journalism was described by the DPP government as a grass-roots

medium reflecting what citizens are really concerned about, and mediating citizens' voices in contrast to the poor quality o f mainstream news media aiming at pleasing popular taste. Blogs have thereby been seen as an online space with fewer barriers for the general public’s media participation where everyone can be a ‘journalist’ and speak out with their own voices. In order to support the development o f citizen journalism in Taiwan, training ‘citizen journalists’ is an essential move to support citizen journalism and deliberative democracy. Thus, many related activities started in 2004. For instance, the National Youth Commission (NYC) began to run a series o f short courses on training ‘citizen journalists’ and set up an ‘official version’ o f its platform for citizen journalists. In the meantime, the notion o f ‘citizen journalist’ has been seen as part o f the e-citizen plan. The NYC also held two training courses in 2005 and trained up to 200 ‘citizen journalists’. The first Citizen Journalist Principle o f Taiwan was also issued by the NYC and those citizen journalists after the training courses. In 2007, a semi-official website, People Post (http://www.peopo.org/T was also launched for the general public to publish their news reports.

The official version o f citizen journalism did attract some attention, but it also received much criticism. The state’s intervention in developing citizen journalism was questioned by some j-bloggers. They criticized that the top-down model had set up an

‘official definition’ of citizen journalism and the pre-determined route o f public online media participation. For example, The NHI conference mentioned above was criticized

for its pre-selection o f issues and participants; and it was also questioned about whether the conclusion could really represent the public’s opinions since it was made up o f people selected by the official department. Under the top-down model, media

participation or citizen journalism was used by the governmental sector as propaganda for the government’s policies. For instance, the NYC, in 2005 and 2006, held several conferences on national affairs and invited young people to attend these conferences and report on them. The conferences included three general topics, the Taiwan-China relationship, social development, and media reform. However, the conclusions o f these citizen conferences apparently echoed the policies o f the DPP. The most manifest example is that some conclusions on the issues o f the relationship between Taiwan and China, such as control over investment in China, reconciliation o f different political parties, enhancing the assimilation o f different ethnic groups in Taiwan, and reinforcing Taiwanese identity are similar to the D PP’s political position, and oppose the stand point o f the KMT, the opposition party.

The top-down model o f encouraging online media participation shows how a new media practice is utilized by political force to facilitate the nation’s development and authority’s special purposes. J-blog or media participation in the online environment in Taiwan are used to confirm (or re-confirm) and communicate the political position o f the ruling party. This political purpose is conducted through the discourse o f democracy or media reform in order to legitimise the policy.

Nevertheless, the public’s media participation in journalism in Taiwan does not precisely follow the route set up by the official authority. This links to another aspect o f j-blogging practice in Taiwan -b log users’ automatic and independent media

participation practices. For instance, some j-blogging practices succeed the tradition of the previous alternative media since the authoritarian period, but have turned their focus

onto broader social and cultural issues rather than only the political one. On the other hand, more and more general users start to use online media for their media

participation in journalism. According to a market survey, 70% o f Internet users in Taiwan had their own blogs by 2007, although not everyone updates their blogs every day (Insight Explorer, 2006). Different from the alternative media that have strong relations with political parties or social groups, these general users seem to conduct their media participation practices independently and these general blog users seem to be more concerned about issues which occur in their everyday lives.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have reviewed the development o f the media and telecom systems in different periods o f time, from the authoritarian to the post-martial law period, in Taiwan. Both the media and telecom systems in Taiwan during the two periods

experienced different ranges o f regulation and deregulation processes. However, media and telecom systems in Taiwan today are operated under what I have called a ‘hybrid regulatory framework’ which combines the idea o f neo-liberalism, social responsibility theory and state intervention. This hybrid framework has yielded a special news culture in Taiwan. On the one hand, deregulation o f the media ban on the basis o f free-market competition has led the news media in Taiwan to pursue circulation and audience ratings by using sensational material; on the other hand, the government tries to interfere with the performance o f media in response to the urges for media reform from the general public. In the meantime, the operation o f telecom systems also relates to the hybrid framework. As I have indicated, after the abolition o f martial law, telecom systems have also experienced progressive deregulation. The government has vowed to establish a liberal, equal and free competition environment for telecom systems.

However, the Taiwanese government, to a certain extent, still adopts different policies

to intervene in the development o f telecom systems because it has been seen as one o f the important infrastructures to the nation.

The practices o f online journalism in Taiwan are relevant to regulation and deregulation o f media and telecom systems. As I have indicated, the development o f online journalism in Taiwan includes two different trajectories, mainstream online journalism and online alternative journalism. The two types o f online journalism

emerged around the same time in Taiwan. Mainstream online journalism in Taiwan has developed for two reasons. Firstly, conventional news outlets, especially newspapers, try to use the online medium to extend their declining readerships, and secondly, the increasing Internet population encourages new businessmen to invest in the highly competitive news industry market in Taiwan. Both reasons are triggered, to a certain extent, by the government's policy o f promoting Internet usage. Nevertheless, the production practices o f mainstream online journalism in Taiwan are also intricately connected with the special news culture in Taiwan. One aspect is that the highly competitive media environment has made the production practices o f mainstream online news a struggle between making a profit and upholding their occupational professionalism. These aspects will be discussed with the support o f my empirical data in Chapters 4 & 5.

Another online journalism, online alternative journalism, emerged from a different social and cultural background in Taiwan. As I have suggested, its development can be traced back to the spirit o f alternative media activities in Taiwan since the authoritarian period such as political magazines, illegal cable television and underground radio stations, but the practices o f most online alternative media have shifted their goals from political purposes to media reform or other purposes. Official power, on the other hand, tries to lead the practices of alternative online journalism to the route they set up for the

purposes o f national development (e.g. the e-citizen project) and to reconfirm the government’s policy (e.g. the consensus conference held by the governmental sector).

However, the general public tends to conduct the practices o f online alternative journalism in different ways. This topic will be discussed in Chapter 7.