2004年6月27日 星期日

媒體經營三標準 江霞不及格

 




在漫天的撻伐質疑聲浪中,江霞還是坐上了華視總經理的寶座,她要大家給她三個月的時間來證明能力。其實,這場「華視大戲」究竟是否酬庸並非重點,政治酬庸雖不是好事,但自古皆有沒什麼了不起,但唯獨不適用於需高度專業的領域,媒體是其一,尤其又是領受民脂的國家公器。






媒體人應捍衛言論自由

所謂媒體管理專業為何,筆者並非傳播專才,按照粗淺的媒體知識認知,最起碼應有三個要件:其一是須嫻熟媒體生態,相信這一點江霞應可適任。


再者,高度管理才能亦不可或缺。江霞究竟有無管理才能,過去沒有任何紀錄、歷程以資證明,高階管理人才的聘用從來都應該是以可證明的學歷資歷為基礎,如華視前任總經理徐璐,雖也被質疑其任命是政治酬庸,但她在台北之音擔任總經理的實務經驗,使人無法挑戰她的專業才能,今天江霞怎可要求納稅人以三個月時間瞭解她到底有沒有能力來搪塞外界質疑,這對專業無疑是最嚴重的踐踏。


最後,也是筆者認為最重要的條件:媒體倫理。


何謂媒體倫理?在筆者的定義中,媒體倫理的核心價值應是自由主義的底線,一個媒體經營者最基本的條件,除了必須嚴守分際不為政治宣傳所用外,更必須具備熱情擁抱自由主義的知識份子風範。


所謂的「知識份子性」當中包括:尊重知識、指責他人時應有真憑實據、有理性討論並接受批評的雅量、不淪為任何人政治傳聲筒,非但不能以集體力量(政黨、族群、國家)壓制、箝錮個人言論思想表達,更要盡其所能捍衛言論自由,這應是一個健康民主社會中媒體應有的倫理與自由主義精神。若此標準檢驗之,江霞在過去一段時間的言論,包括「外省人的歌仔戲」,「泛藍藝人不要進華視」等等,都離這種最低倫理標準差得太遠,表現令人扼腕。


以此三標準一一評斷江霞,可以說是媒體的專業不足、倫理不行,不曉得她究竟還剩下什麼?若江霞任命案真是一樁百分之百的政治酬庸,那麼可以說是極不恰當的酬庸;但若非酬庸就是政治任命,那我們不免要合理懷疑,難道陳水扁需要的正是江霞的政治作為─即是由其來強化族群撕裂嗎?


 


——蘋果日報,2004年06月29日






 


黨政軍退出媒體成口號

像這般將政治黑手赤裸裸伸入媒體的作為,對照過去民進黨喊得震天價響的黨政軍退出媒體的口號,不正是一齣最可笑、諷刺的歷史戲碼?


看看江霞這幾天的言論中,唯一一句讓筆者愛聽且頗感興味的話:她說,她對偷拍反感,因為「水準很差」─雖然並不意味這句話就使她適任華視總經理。《非常報導》光碟被認為是社會集體低俗化的產物,跟偷拍比較起來,在低俗評比上恐怕猶「低」一籌,倘若江總經理反對低俗的偷拍行為,我倒想問問她:妳反不反對「非常光碟」? 







 


2004年6月2日 星期三

When Will Beijing Say Sorry?

Not long after he was released from prison
in 1998, Wang Dan visited me in Taiwan. It was the first meeting of China’s two
most-wanted Tiananmen student leaders in nearly a decade, and we had a lot to
talk about. We were still talking the next day when the sun came up.


 


Wang Dan and I studied at different
universities, and we didn’t meet until the early days of the Tiananmen
protests. It had been 10 years since the killings in Beijing on June 4 1989 had
set our lives on different trajectories. He had spent his time as a political
prisoner; I had spent mine living the good life in France, the U.S. and finally
Taiwan. That didn’t mean we didn’t have a lot of things to talk about. We did. Above
all, we had to talk about whether we had done the right thing. Neither of us could
be completely sure we had.


 


It was a difficult night, and it was a
particularly difficult because, among the many things that came up, we talked
about Ding Zilin. On the night of June 3, 1989, when I had already begun a
flight to freedom that would take me to Hong Kong within a month, Ding Zilin’s
17-year-old son, Jiang Jielan, joined the protests on the streets of Beijing,
even though his mother had begged him to stay home. I was one of the leaders of
those protests, and so was Wang Dan. Three hours later Ding Zilin’s son was
shot dead.


 


So much of what happened that night and
early the next day is still a mystery. We don’t know, for example, how many
Beijing students and citizens were shot dead like Ding Zilin’s son—hundreds,
thousands; you choose. I don’t think we ever will. But Ding Zilin, at least, has
spent the last 15 years bravely reminding us that it happened. She does still, by
persuading other families to stand up and count the ones they lost. She gets
arrested on a regular basis, especially as June 4 approaches, but she continues
to remind us—as she put it five years after she lost her son—that the
“blood-splattered streets of Beijing have been paved over with a new
concrete—brand-named ‘economic progress.’” As the head of the Tiananmen Mothers
Campaign, which calls on the Beijing government to accept accountability for
the bloodshed, she has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and in a braver,
more honest world she would get it.


 


When her name came up that night with Wang
Dan, I felt a lot of things, but mostly I felt guilty. I felt guilty about
having survived and having made it to France and the U.S. when so many others
died. I felt guilty that I had not stayed behind and gone to jail like Wang Dan.
I felt guilty that I had not done enough to remind the world that the China I
had failed to change had got no better since I left. I felt guilty that perhaps
I was in some way responsible for the death of Ding Zilin’s son. 


 


I felt so guilty that I suggested to Wang
Dan that we make a telephone call that I had put off making for far too long.
Wang Dan—who had her number—made the call, and after a few words of greeting, he
said: “Wu’er Kaixi is with me, and he has something he wants to say to you.”


 


I took the phone and said to Ding Zilin the
only thing that could be said.


 


“Sorry,” I said to her. “I can’t even ask
you for forgiveness.”


 


“I’m just happy that you finally called,”
Ding Zilin said back.


 


All three of us began to cry, and I said:
“We can’t replace the son you lost, but Wang Dan and I want you to think of us as
your sons.”


 


That happened more than six years ago, and
the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen is upon us already—15 years in exile for me,
a decade in and out of prison followed by five years of exile for Wang Dan, and
15 years mourning a son for Ding Zilin. Some of my pain lifted when I spoke to
Ding Zilin that night, but not all of it—I will spend the rest of my life regretting
the lives that were lost in 1989. I am taking this occasion to say it publicly
to Ding Zilin and to everybody who lost someone they loved.


 


Wang Dan and I were young men who thought
we could change the world, and we inadvertently led a lot of people to their
deaths. That has caused a lot of pain to a lot of people, and an apology is a
first step towards healing that pain. However, it should not be forgotten that
the most important apology—the apology that would allow my exiled generation to
go home—is still to come. That apology belongs to the men who ordered the
shootings.


 


I have spent months thinking about how the
15th anniversary of Tiananmen should be marked. It has been difficult to decide.
The world has changed. These, in so many ways, are less idealistic times than
those giddy days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and before freedom came to
the Eastern Bloc and Nelson Mandela emerged from jail—when anything briefly seemed
possible. But, if, for just one day, we could return to that idealism, in the
spirit of the students who took to the streets of Beijing in 1989, I would ask
the world to spend it looking hard at the China with which it has struck its
business deals, and remembering that the mothers of Beijing are still waiting
for their apology. Until it comes, China will remain a dark place where a
mourning mother who challenges the official monopoly on the truth faces summary
arrest, and where idealistic young students who seek democratic change are
forced into exile.


 


Without that apology, China’s progress of
the past 15 years is an illusion. The introduction of the economic freedoms
that has brought prosperity to urban China since Tiananmen is an
acknowledgement by the Chinese people that students of my generation had a
right to protest. But the lack of an apology is a reminder that China’s new
prosperity continues at the expense of freedom of expression and democratic participation.
An apology, in short, would signal the long-suppressed next stage of
Tiananmen’s unfinished revolution. 


 


——This article is published at the Wall Street Journal, June 4th, 2004.  15th Anniversay of the Tiananmen Massacre.