I suppose I am opening myself up to endless flack here but, as the managing editor of the Taipei Times, and one of the original group of six behind the newspaper’s founding, I have at least as much insight into the weaknesses of the English-language press, including my own newspaper, as anybody else. I also worked at the Taiwan News, or China News as it was in those days for about three years until being sacked for having the wrong political preferences.
Reading the postings on this site makes me think there is a lack of understanding out there about what the conditions are like for any English newspaper in Taiwan; there is even a lack of understanding about what newspapers are about.
First let’s address the endless accusations of bias. I don’t understand what the argument here is. Newspapers have an attitude. And people buy the newspaper with the attitude that suits them. People accept that the Washington Post is “liberal” (and Democratic) and that the Wall Street Journal is conservative (and largely Republican). In Britain the gulf between the political convictions of the Guardian and the Telegraph mirrors that of their readership. Call it bias, call it conviction, call it editorial policy, the people that run newspapers usually have an ax to grind, a social vision they want to champion, a pet political party. That’s what newspapers are all about.
So what is the Taipei Times about? According to a directive issued by the president of the company yesterday it is to help the world understand the fact that Taiwan is an independent sovereign country, to help Taiwan gain acceptance by the rest of the world as such, and to support the values of democratic freedoms, human rights and the rule of law in Taiwan itself.
So those who accuse us of being pro-DPP are wrong. Actually I think the DPP government is something close to a shambles. We ( by which I mean the editorial board of the newspaper) have ideas in common with the DPP. But that is not to say we are in the DPP’s pocket. We, and I personally, do have a great deal of respect for Lee Teng-hui. I would not say he is without fault, but he has done more good for Taiwan than any other politician ever has. But we aren’t in the TSU’s pocket either and in fact I am skeptical that the TSU will make anything like the impact people think, including my own newspaper, actually.
Given that we support Taiwan’s sovereign independence, then we naturally take a dim view of reunificationists. Those of you who want to accuse us of outrageous bias might therefore want to search our Web site and look at the amount of space given to the views of notorious pro-unification figures such as Elmer Feng. We loath Feng, as it happens, but in the interests of balance we DO report what he and those like him say, in considerable detail.
As for the question of James Soong, no we don’t run pictures of Soong on the front page. Mr. Lin, the owner of our newspaper and the Liberty Times, loathes Soong with a passion and gets apoplectic whenever he sees him. Frankly, I don’t think that not running front page pictures of Soong, who I personally believe to be a criminal, is quite as bad as refusing to report human rights abuses in China because you want to sign lucrative deals with the Chinese communists, a policy forced upon papers such as the Times of London (which people still think of as a “respected” newspaper), by Rupert Murdoch. I sleep easy.
On the other hand Mr. Lin was rooting for Lien Chan in the presidential election, whom we thought a joke and frequently said so without any interference from “upstairs.”
So the whole question of who controls a newspaper’s editorial policy is far more complex than most of the contributors to this discussion imagine. I used to write editorials about three times a week when we launched, now I only do it once a week. But I must have written about 150 of the things In the last two years and nobody above me has ever told me what to write or what line to take or taken exception to anything I have written – unlike the China News where I was sacked in 1995 for saying in an editorial that the KMT was stealing the DPP’s ideas.
I might add, having gone into what we are about, it is my impression that the China Post is a staunchly pro-reunification paper with a New Party-style outlook. As for the News, when it was owned by the contemptible Wei family, it used to be similar to the Post, but because it relied on foreign managing editors its attitude was muted to the point of being reasonable. Then I-mei took over and it now seems to be a vanity publication for a handful of Taiwan independence extremists. It certainly can’t be called a newspaper anymore.
On to everybody’s biggest beef, mistakes. Sure our paper has mistakes, so do the others. The point is that picking a typo out of a line of text in the morning is very different from having to proofread a page of text at 11:30pm after a day’s work. All of you who haven’t worked at a local paper wonder how things slip by. All of you who have worked at a paper know how they do. The point is that, at least as far as we are concerned, it is not laziness. We do care. I would say it is lack of skill and lack of time. By the time our news gets to be copyedited and laid out, the proofing is hurried because of our early print deadline. I have begged to get the news in earlier but since so much of it is timed for the evening news broadcasts the reporters can’t finish earlier nor can we go to press later. So we have to do the best we can.
Part of the problem is that the talent isn’t available here in Taiwan. If you a good copy editor you can get a job just about anywhere. In Asia you would head for Hong Kong where you can earn twice as much as we pay. So basically we have to put the newspaper together using people that are sick of English teaching and want to come to us to learn a usable craft. Few people want to stay in Taiwan for a long time so staff turnover is always high, the people you hire have very basic editing skills and no knowledge of Taiwan – some idiot who works for me actually put “Keelung County” in a story the other day – so you fight an uphill battle on quality control every day. A junior copy editor at the Times, working a 44-hour week, earns about the same as an English teacher teaching about 20 hours a week, and we are by far the best payers.
Part of my job is to interview and test prospective copy editors. I probably see a couple of dozen possibles a year. I receive resumes every day. One thing that I have noticed is that people always think they are far better as editors than they really are, and have far better English skills than they really have. I have never met anyone coming in here for a job who thinks that their English skills are less than superlative. When I give job applicants the Chinglish rewrite test, telling them specifically that I want to see something that I can put in the newspaper when they have finished – which means they must polish and proof their finished copy – you would be shocked at the incompetent rubbish that I often get back, articles missed out, words duplicated, mistakes that just reading the copy once should have eradicated. The truth is that the vast majority of people who complain about the quality of the editing of the paper could not pass the test to become a probationary copy editor. That does not justify mistakes. But it does give you an idea of how damned hard it is to find halfway decent staff.
As for story quality, the problem is really that of the Taiwanese newspaper mindset. Sensationalist, no sense of following stories, no tradition of investigative journalism. Someone on this thread suggested studying Chinese so that you could read the Chinese press and not be dependent on the “inferior” English press. Well, FYI that is exactly what I did in the early 1990s, spending years at Shih-ta bringing my Chinese up to newspaper-reading level, wading through The Journalist (then much better than it is now, of course) every week trying to find deep background to Taiwan current affairs. Frankly, I was bitterly disappointed. It has taken me a decade to come to understand that what is most interesting about what happens in Taiwan is well known to the political and cultural elite, about 3,000 people who all went to school with each other, and does not get into the newspapers because in a way they consider it to be family business – “this thing of ours.” That was what was so shocking about the Chung Hsing Bills Finance Scandal. Not that it was an attempt to smear James Soong, but rather that the lid had been raised on “business as usual” in an incredibly threatening and dangerous way at the risk of mutually assured political and social destruction.
But hey, I’ve gone on long enough. I would be happy to answer questions, as long as they are civil. Having put up with more BS that a man should ever have to do to get this newspaper this far, I am sometimes surprised to find out that I still care. The Times is not what it was supposed to be when we planned it. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t get there, only that, like Christopher Columbus, we underestimated the difficulty and the time the journey would take.
L.