Understand the world to win it over - TW

[dArKeR]

Last week Formosa TV started a one-hour English news program. We wish FTV well in this project, but we cannot help thinking that the auguries are not on the TV company's side. In the last 10 years too many of these programs have launched and flopped to count. They have suffered from a toxic mixture of a lack of financial and editorial commitment on the part of the TV companies, abysmally low production standards, a lack of understanding as to who, if anyone, might be the audience for such programs and a concomitant failure to know how to appeal to any audience there might be.

We do not seek to heap these criticisms on FTV's head. After all, it is early days. But it was hard not to take note of Government Information Office Director-General Lin Chia-lung's (???) ambition that FTV's English output -- there is, apparently, to be far more to come, above and beyond news -- will be a way of getting around Taiwan's diplomatic isolation. It is a way of letting the rest of the world know about Taiwan.

To achieve such an ambition it is of course necessary that the world get to know Taiwan for the right things: its liberal politics, its open society, its economic vitality. The problem is that in the past these kinds of news and cultural programs have only succeeded in getting Taiwan known for its shoddy production values, lack of professionalism and pidgin English.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/09/13/2003202745