Comparison of news between Mainland and Taiwan

I like to look at politics with a symmetrical perspective; I also like to observe media behavior. So why don't I combine the two and share what I observe from news from Mainland China and in Taiwan.

	People's Republic	Republic
We see this everyday	Some minister-level official signed an agreement with his/her counterpart. Our leaders are busy.	Key found in drink, dog jumped off a building, automatic doors of a convenient store slammed on customer, disputes between restaurants and consumers (news with no journalistic values)
International news	Israel is bombarding Palestine again. Civilian death toll has reached X. (But never mention how many civilians Hamas has killed.)	Did Beyoncé mime when she performed at the U.S. presidential inauguration?
Political alignment	align with The Party	TVBS, CTI, China Times, Era, ETTV, UDN, and the China Post obviously pro-Pan-Blue FTV, SET, the Liberty Times, and Taipei Times obviously pro-Pan-Green
Workers and farmers	now produce much more, thanks to xyz program from the government	are protesting on Ketagalan Boulevard
College/grad students	innovate new techonlogy	are protesting on Ketagalan Boulevard
Bad habits die hard	like to educate viewers so and so land has been Chinese territory since antiquity	like to speculate the emotion of the person being reported. Must use literary 4-worded idioms.
Female anchor's voice	low	sharp
Languages	Mandarin, dialects of Han Chinese, Mongolian, Uyghur, Tibetan, Zhuang, English, Spanish, Russian, French, Arabic, Korea, Japanese, and Portuguese	Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka, English
English news	Propaganda to native English speakers	English learning material. Sometimes they speak very slowly.

If I were to describe the two positively, then I'd have to say that Mainland news have broader vision, while Taiwanese news enjoy higher press freedom.

Last but not least, let's enjoy 2 new clips

News ticker in Taiwan

New channels in Taiwan always come with new tickers. They come in vertical format and horizontal; they tell you weather, lotto numbers, stock prices, exchange rates, minor news, reminders like "Watch the grand finale on channel XY", and how many points has Chien-Ming Wang Jeremy Lin got.


Alright, jokes aside, amongst these seemingly standardized things, you can still find differences across the world, and the subtle variations are shreds of evidence that reveal the different state of minds. The Chinese Wikipedia actually has an article about news screen!

Mock Taiwanese news screen	Mock Japanese news screen
Mock Mainland-Chinese news screen	Mock HK news screen
Mock American news screen

SNG unit report

When you watch news on Taiwanese TV channels, do you often hear "John Du, SGN (satellite news gathering) unit report" or "Jane Du satellite report from Washington"? What I'm going to discuss is not the content of news because everyone knows just how bad it is. I'd like to discuss something technical, something applicable everywhere in the world.

As an audience, I don't care how the pictures are transmitted to my TV. What I care about are location and time. They usually show the location, although the precision is not completely satisfactory. Time is just as important as location. Since news is called "news", then they have the duty of showing how new the news is. Some SNG pictures are live, and then get recycled during the next hour, and over and over again. So what if they tell me it's SNG? I'd rather see time stamps that include full date and with the precision of minute. This is a very simple technology, yet it provides vital information. Many news reports involve A saying something, then B responding to A, and then C saying something. In this case, the ordering is very important. In addition, news shown in late night or early morning are usually rerun. And the news may include video recorded even earlier, possibly ranged from 4 to 20 hours ago. At this time, they must show two time stamps, anchor's time and the video's time. Furthermore, people who watch news at this time during the day usually don't have the sense of time. Showing time stamps help these people come to sense. And pictures captured in another time zone must include local time and the time in major broadcasting area.

Some people might think nobody would care about this, except geeks like me. But do you not see reporters' names included in news articles, printed and televised alike? Most of these people are not famous. Why? This is a form of responsible journalism. Showing time stamps is also a form of responsible journalism, as a proof of not falsifying the sequence of events, or misleading the audience.

Example

Mumbai, India
Picture in local time	5:30 PM 2/25/2008
Picture in Taipei time	8:00 PM 2/25/2008
Anchor's time	9:13 PM 2/25/2008
Now	1:13 AM 2/26/2008
(not lotto numbers)

See also (all in Chinese)

• 學校沒有教的新聞學（一）SNG新聞
  「Satellite News Gathering，也有人說是Some News Garbage」
• 娘～～是SNG車啦！
  「垃圾車與SNG車，兩著共通處在於裡頭全都裝的是垃圾」
• 臺灣媒體亂象

Kosovo declaration of independence

If you land here to read about Kosovo's act, then this is not the best place. I apologize in advance. I am no expert of Balkans' politics, but I do know that this event is important enough to be on the headline. It is between 1:19 AM and 3:37 AM on 2/18/2008 in Taipei (6:19 PM to 8:37 PM 2/17 in Kosovo, 12:19 PM to 2:37 PM 2/17 in New York) when I compose this blog post. Let's take a look at the front pages of news media inside and outside Taiwan.

BBC News


Financial Times


People's Daily

科索沃 = Kosovo, 独立 = independence

CNN


Le Monde


Yomiuri Shimbun

コソボ = Kosovo, 独立 = independence

In Taiwan
United Daily News

陳冠希 = Edison Chen

China Times

A political gossip related to the presidential election

Liberty Times

Unregistered helicopter "handcuffed"

Apple Daily

建仔 = 王建民 = Chien-Ming Wang

TVBS

入聯 = to join the UN

SET

An old man (grandpa) spent a night in a night club with no money at all. He had to strip and leave all clothes as collateral.

CTI

Just a "real time" news ticker. No sign of Kosovo.

Eastern Television

陳冠希 = Edison Chen

Era News

Drunk man hit mom

Formosa TV News

錯誤 = error

Technology news in Taiwan

I am tired of those so called "mainstream" print media in Taiwan. When they talk about "tech news", most of them are about the increase/decrease of production, revenue, and the up and down of stock prices. These are "tech industry news", which are more business than technology at the core. Indeed, those are useful information. And as media, they have the duty to report it. But not all readers are investors. On the contrary, most are consumers. The impact to consumers is usually briefly mentioned. Is this product like microwave oven, which will change the way we do things, or is it just a trendy thing? Is there any obvious short coming? Substitute? Cons and pros? You hardly see those.

This could be attributed to the manufacturer's state of mind that lasted for decades. Manufacturers do not need to worry too much about what the consumers want or need. All they need to take care of is the number: capital, income, expense. The challenge that Taiwanese firms face right now is not how to make things at a very cheap cost and with a superb quality. They've already achieved that. The challenge is to choose a path. They can continue their current course, and be the leader. Or they can sell their products directly to consumers, then in turn establish their brands. The latter would cause an immediate problem: their customers would become competitors instantly. It's too early to tell. I seem to deviate from the original topic too much.