Animated clips fuel debate on media freedom
New York Times, December 9, 2009
Taipei, Taiwan -- A young man slaps his grandfather to the floor, bloodying him. Another slices off his girlfriend’s hair with a knife after she says she wants to break up with him.
A group of junior high students bullies a girl — beating her, forcing her to strip to her underwear and then snapping pictures with their cellphones.
Animations depicting such events, mixed with video and still photos, are typical “Action News” clips on the Web site of the Apple Daily, Taiwan’s most widely read newspaper. One such clip — about Tiger Woods — recently took the Internet by storm, prompting a mix of ridicule and awe in the United States. But in Taiwan, the clips have provoked a debate over media freedoms and responsibility, and government regulation.
Child welfare groups and media watchdogs have protested outside the Apple Daily’s offices. The Taipei city government fined Apple Daily $31,000 for failing to shield youth from the sensational, and often violent, content.
The Taiwanese government is among the first in the world to grapple with how to regulate such free-wheeling — some say irresponsible — new media products. The young democracy is especially wary of any controls on the news media, given four decades of censorship under the Kuomintang government.
Even as regulators review the Web animation, they are grappling with plans by Apple Daily’s parent, Next Media, which is based in Hong Kong, to expand into television. The group wants to open five TV stations in Taiwan, using segments from the same animation studio that helps produce Action News.
“While we believe print media still has a role, we think the importance of graphics and the digital world is going to increase more and more,” the Next Media chief executive, Chu Wah-Hui, said by telephone from Hong Kong.
On Wednesday, the Taiwanese telecommunications regulator rejected Next Media’s applications for news and variety channel licenses, saying the sample clips the company had submitted violated its “core values,” including a legal requirement that broadcasters “uphold human dignity.” It said the company was free to apply again.
Tseng Shiann-kang, a spokesman for the National Communications Commission, said officials were consulting with experts on the use of animation in online and TV news reports. “Some reports may be false and could create misunderstandings,” Mr. Tseng said. While Apple Daily’s newspaper and other publications have used cartoon depictions of crimes and accidents for years, he said moving animation “has a bigger effect” on viewers. “We need to strictly review such content, especially for news and children’s programs,” Mr. Tseng said.
Taipei officials said much the same thing when they banned Apple Daily’s newspaper in schools and libraries until the telecommunications regulator and the Ministry of Interior were satisfied it had sufficiently classified and restricted its content. Readers with cellphone cameras can snap a code on the paper’s front page to view Action News videos.
Rose Chao, a spokeswoman for the Taipei city government, insisted that it supported freedom of the news media. “The core of the issue is to protect children and adolescents,” she said. What Apple Daily has done “is to package sex crimes with animation under the name of news, and this might endanger the hearts and minds of children and adolescents.”
The initial furor over the animated clips quieted down after Apple Daily issued a public apology, changed some of its content, and put a “restricted” notice on some videos. However, any user merely has to click a button saying "I am at least 18 years old" to access that content.
Leon Chuang, of the Association of Taiwan Journalists, which participated in the protest against Apple Daily, said his group isn’t “completely” opposed to Action News, and its members think Taipei went too far in banning the newspaper from schools and libraries. But he said the group opposes animated clips of crimes or accidents involving minors.
“It’s like they’re being hurt a second time,” said Mr. Chuang. “For us, we oppose this part -- and we don’t think there’s any news value.”
When the controversy erupted, Apple Daily threatened legal action against the Taipei government and accused it of violating media freedoms. But it has since softened its tone. Mr. Chu said that, in response to the outcry, Action News would no longer use animated segments in news reports involving children.
"We were probably a little too excited by the technology and the ability to do what we couldn’t do before, and we went overboard,” he said. “We apologized.”
But he dismissed the suggestion that Apple Daily was playing fast and loose with the facts, saying Action News shares the same reporting limitations as any news-gathering outfit. “We’re not pretending that this is exactly what happened,” said Mr. Chu. “We’re just using visual images to present what we believe, to the best of the journalist’s ability, to have happened.”
Next Media is no stranger to controversy. The Taiwanese government raided the offices of the island’s edition in 2002 after a report alleging that Taiwan had maintained a secret, multimillion-dollar “slush fund” to woo foreign allies.
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