More media madness

Yahoo! Taiwan shuts down the Mango Daily (芒果日報), a green-leaning blog which has been focusing on the student protests. The reason for the shutdown remains unclear. Lots of info at that link, though (Hat tip Maddog).

If this is a political decision, it would seem confirm that that old self-censoring mentality, which Taiwanese parents & professors still exhibit, and which Chinese media is using on a daily basis, may be creeping back into some Taiwanese media, even something as new and apolitical as Yahoo!

Business Today (今周刊) reports in issue 622 that the CEO of Wantwant Group (旺旺集團), Tsai Eng-meng/Cai Yanming (蔡衍明), hosted a dinner on the 16th for all the top executives at his newly acquired asset, the China Times Group. It was there that Tsai, who is a Hong-Kong based Chinese Taiwanese businessman with with lots of Chinese investments and a few Taiwanese investments, supposedly sent down three orders for the paper to use as guidelines: To protect President Ma with all their might, to reconcile the misunderstandings between the people on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, and to report no news dealing with unification or independence (全力擁護馬英九總統、化解兩岸人民誤會、所有新聞皆無關統獨。).

In my view, motivations for Tsai's orders (if they were given) are likely to be financial; Tsai may sense an imminent partial opening of Taiwanese media to enter China, and he may want to be on the front end of the invitation list. In any case, the group's news reports wouldn't be much different than the China Times Group has been since, say, 1950. Not so sure about this; the guy can probably open up plenty of Chinese media investments already, if he wanted to.