Taiwan Matters!

Says Chen Shui-bian is just a "leader" and
tens/hundreds of thousands are merely "thousands"

After three posts [1, 2, 3] and several complaints to the BBC about their harmful coverage of Taiwan, they're still at it.

The day after the 916 rally on Ketagalan Boulevard to support Taiwan's president Chen Shui-bian, another article with no byline appears, written in a style which observant readers would realize is designed to not provoke China, a country whose unelected leaders constantly behave like 3-year-olds who've just had all of their toys taken away.

Reading through the head-lie
The headline of today's imbalanced piece reads "Thousands rally for Taiwan leader." The people who won't see anything but the headline far outnumber those who will actually read the article, and that's the impression that will remain.

The subhead tells us something a bit different:

Tens of thousands of Taiwanese have taken to the streets of the capital, Taipei, in support of their embattled President, Chen Shui-bian

But there's more. The remainder of the article refers to Chen as "the president" two more times and as "Mr Chen" a total of five times.

Let X = X
Chen Shui-bian is Taiwan's president. He's the democratically-elected president of Taiwan, the nation. Hu Jintao is an unelected "leader" of a country ruled by authoritarians. Shih Ming-teh is an unelected leader of a mob that wants to use extralegal means to "depose" President Chen (see how easy it is to type?), despite having legal means at his disposal. Even school children can be "class leaders."

Titles have meaning. If you called your physician Mr./Ms. Chen instead of Dr. Chen (or whatever his/her surname actually is), he or she would naturally feel strange. Even the infamous literary character Dr. Jekyll is addressed with either the appropriate title or none at all, but never as "Mr. Jekyll."

How many "thousands" is 100,000? I'm sure even the editors at BBC could answer that. While 100,000 is still a number of thousands, words mean things, context changes meaning, and care should be exercised by media professionals.

Even if we go with the figure of 60,000 provided by police [NOTE: Sunday's Taipei Times tells us that police "refused to offer any figure" and "that from now on it would not release such statistics."], the BBC headline downplays what happened in reality. If we read further, the article diminishes the importance of Saturday's pan-green rally by making a comparison to the red-shirted rallies the previous day in which people were mobilized by the Shih camp.

The numbers apparently are important to some people.

The BBC doesn't even let us see with our own eyes how many people were there. In the image accompanying their article, you can count 2-1/2 faces and a single hand from each of two more people. Therefore, we can only see five people in the photo. Sunday's Taipei Times gives us a much better photo, although they make the exact same "mistake" with the numbers in their head-lie. (I bet a computer program could do a decent job of telling us how many people are in such a photo.)

Each time they report about demonstrations, instead of playing games with the numbers, why not offer the readers a photograph that shows as much of the crowd as possible -- like from a helicopter -- and let us determine the numbers for ourselves? Could it be that they have ulterior motives?

Misunderstood characters: Taiwan, 台灣, Chen Shui-bian, 陳水扁, A-bian, 阿扁, democracy, 民主, BBC, 英國廣播公司, 916, 挺扁, China, 中國, protest, 抗議

Cross-posted at It's Not Democracy, It's A Conspiracy!

Labels: 916, BBC, China, protest, Tim Maddog, 中國, 抗議, 英國廣播公司

*posted @ 6:03 AM by Tim Maddog* [Permalink] 3 comments

They don't get it because they don't want to

As expected, there was unfortunate violence associated with Saturday's rally to support democracy and Taiwan's president Chen Shui-bian. A man wearing a "Taiwan Nation" (台灣國) shirt was attacked by people wearing red shirts even as he left the Taipei train station under police protection. On Friday evening, opponents of President Chen had moved their "sit-in" to the train station to intimidate people arriving for the pro-Chen rally on Saturday. It's surprising that we didn't see more of this. Perhaps the media was looking the other way.

At the scene of the rally on Ketagalan Boulevard, a CTI anchor had to be whisked away as the crowd around his platform got riled up. As he fled the scene with the help of police and DPP legislator Wang Shih-cheng (王世堅), it looked like one person may have landed a blow to the back of the anchor's head. Pan-blue media showed the footage every 10 or 15 minutes for the rest of the day. A cameraman for FTV (usually seen as being pro-green) on the scene was foolishly wearing a red jacket and had a "Depose Chen" sticker on his camera. Unsurprisingly, he was not welcomed by the people there.

In all of these cases, the reactions seem unjustified, but we certainly can't count on the media to tell us the full story in any case.

[UPDATE: Here's some video of the cameraman where you can see the sticker on his camera, found on Wang Ben-hu's (汪笨湖) BBS.]

My wife relates that an anchor on ETTV described the people at the rally as being comprised mostly of betel nut chewers, people with foul mouths, and others who came because they were paid or for free boxed lunches. (I should remind readers of the free massages said to be available at Shih Ming-teh's "sit-in.")

[UPDATE #2: Wang Ben-hu's BBS comes to the rescue again by linking to cartoonist Yufu's (漁夫) blog where he put up some nice video showing that the crowd included lots of young, educated, non-violent people. The video is accompanied by the pro-Taiwan song, "Taiwan is Our Baby." My wife helped me dig up an article on the ETToday web site which pretends to be news, but comes across as little more than a factually-challenged editorial. It says (my translation) that "60% of the crowd was male... Half of the men were aged 40 - 50; of the other half, 2/3 are above the age of 50... Among the 40 - 50 group, most Chen supporters were smokers and betel nut chewers, and their conversation was full of vulgarities... There were many gangsters with tattoos... Of course, there were refined people there, but their numbers were few... Half of the female Chen supporters were middle-aged... The numbers can be attributed to the DPP's male chauvinism..."]

It's nicer on the green side
But if you've ever been to a pro-green rally, you would find most of the above a bit peculiar. Pro-green rallies are full of life, energy, music, and families. The people who attend come from all walks of life. Teachers and students, farmers and housewives, doctors and lawyers, bloggers and readers, but the common denominator is that they're mostly friendly and aren't the least bit confrontational -- unless provoked.

If you're interested in seeing some footage shot on Ketagalan Blvd. on Saturday that's different from the distorted pan-blue media coverage, I found a 30'15" Windows Media video (77.6 MB, in Taiwanese and Mandarin) via a comment on Wang Ben-hu's (汪笨湖) web site, where you can now also watch his web-only show.