From last Monday's Taipei Times:
166 countries get National Geographic, and Taiwan gears up to be the FIRST COUNTRY IN HISTORY to slap it with fines for objectionable programming? For two documentaries touching on the subject of the People's Republic of China? Which not even the PRC (which also receives National Geographic) has complained about?
Hmm. My Spidey-sense is tingling . . .
Ho said parents complained that their children were terrified after watching the goat-beheading scene in the film, where blood was splattered everywhere. The documentary was broadcast at 1:30pm, Ho said.
“It [beheading the goat] was not a religious ritual and the goat was killed because of a feud between two families,” Ho said. “The scene lasted about two minutes and was not blocked by any mosaics. Neither did the channel warn the audience about the gory scene to come.”
Let's be honest: it DOES sound pretty grisly. Couldn't have been that bad though if no one from 166 other countries complained about it.
(BTW, is Mr. Ho implying that showing gory goat-beheadings on TV are only objectionable when they're done as a result of family feuds? That they're A-OK when they're part of religious rituals?)
There was another documentary the Taiwanese government just couldn't . . . stomach:
“The documentary explicitly showed the internal organs of the mummy,” Ho said, “The channel did warn the audience about the scene, but members on the panel thought it was more appropriate that the documentary was aired at a later hour.”
You've got to be kidding me. The general practitioner in my neighborhood has a gigantic 3' X 4' anatomical poster prominently displayed in his office. You know the one — the cut-away kind which shows EVERY internal organ of a man's GI tract, from the esophagus right down to the anal sphincter.
And yet a few dessicated and unrecognizable body parts on the small screen are somehow more objectionable than that?
We are being told to accept two things here:
1) These two programs are uniquely offensive — out of the hundreds or thousands of documentaries that National Geographic has aired.
And:
2) Of all the parents there are to be found in a 166 countries, that Taiwan's parents are unequaled in their squeamishness.
Unlikely. The Chinese Nationalist Party is hot for surrender to unification with China. And so Radio Taiwan International is issued an order not to criticize China. KMT-friendly media compliantly see no evil when Chinese tourists come to call. And KMT shills pretending to be parents issue bogus complaints about educational networks like National Geographic, which are to be punished for confusing impressionable youths with negative images of the PRC.
After all, the KMT has labored mightily to convince the young in Taiwan that China is the land of cute and fuzzy pandas (and money, money, money!). Why permit anyone to muddy the waters with images of family feuds and goat decapitations?