Life

ROC Cabinet to submit nominations for public TV board

• Publication Date：08/21/2012
• Source： Taiwan Today
• By  June Tsai

The ROC Executive Yuan will submit a supplementary list of candidates for Public Television Service’s board of directors after an Aug. 20 review meeting failed to produce the required number of members.

Cabinet Spokesperson Hu Yu-wei said the Ministry of Culture, which is in charge of the nomination procedure, will come up with new names for Cabinet approval as soon as possible to facilitate PTS operations and meet public expectations.

At least 12 new directors were needed to round out the board, which according to the Public Television Act should be composed of 17 to 21 members, but after two rounds of voting the review meeting selected only three. Previous meetings June 29 and Aug. 7 had picked five directors.

Review committee members complained that the list of 14 candidates gave them too few choices and was not socially representative. In addition, the requirement that three-fourths of the committee approve a nominee is too high, they said.

“The MOC list is far too elitist and there is a lack of heterogeneity in candidates’ backgrounds,” Huang Yu-hong, a committee member, said at a news conference following the meeting.

He noted that while most of the nominees are cultural figures, respected intellectuals and professionals, the need for representatives of the disadvantaged, subcultures and rural areas seems to have been overlooked.

Review member Liao Chang-sung agreed, urging that future supplementary nominations take gender, class, region and ethnicity into consideration.

“The failure this time actually gives everyone a chance to reconsider how public TV, in contrast to commercial TV, can represent and serve society,” Huang added.

In the meeting three candidates were elected to the PTS supervisory board, meeting the required number of members.

Controversy surrounding the PTS board of directors stems from the fact that current board members have been in office for 20 months past the end of their three-year terms Dec. 3, 2010, because of legal disputes among directors and between the board and the supervising government agency, the now-defunct Government Information Office. (THN)