Taiwan: the International Media Covers It Like a Bad Toupee

Media coverage of Taiwan is usually terrible. Mix in about equal parts of totally wrong, obviously biased, and generally clueless, and you'd have a media Taiwan-"analysis cocktail." Add some hemlock with a lemon twist and you're done!

Terrible media? Well, DUH. Haven't I been saying this for years? Still, it's nice to see someone else bang this drum so I can take a rest. (My most recent complaint was in this post.)

Blurb:

What makes us pause is the oftentimes erroneous reporting about Taiwan — willful or accidental — that is being fed to the global community and how uncritically wire copy is treated by news outlets, which allows bias or outright misrepresentation to pass as news.

Leaving behind eight long years of skewed reporting on former president Chen Shui-bian, who for some news agencies was the agent provocateur par excellence, who never failed to “anger” and “provoke” Beijing, or “alienate” Washington with his “extremism” and “separatism,” the post-Chen era promised to bring with it a sea change in reporting on Taiwan and its new president, Ma Ying-jeou.

At long last, the elected leader of Taiwan was “charismatic” and “Harvard-educated,” the epitome of “pragmatism” who was seeking to make “peace” with long-time “rival” China. During the presidential election, many agencies threw their supposed journalistic neutrality out the window and unashamedly supported Ma and the KMT by trumpeting the promises of an immediate fix to the economy that the previous government under Chen had “mismanaged.”

WORD.