The Associated Press (AP) and CNN have apologised to Taiwan Vice-President Annette Lu for a controversial article about earlier last week, the country’s Central News Agency has reported quoting a Presidential office release.
The release Friday said Lu’s office had received letters from AP President and Chief Executive Officer Thomas Curley and CNN Executive Vice-President Chris Cramer. It said that the quick responses showed their desire to deal carefully with the incident, as well as respect for Taiwan and the vice-president.
AP filed a story Tuesday on Lu’s candidacy, saying in the lead that Lu was branded by China as “insane” and “the scum of the nation”, and said in the third paragraph that Lu’s chances of winning were slim. CNN carried the entire AP story on its website, but used its own headline “Taiwan’s ‘scum of the nation’ runs for president,” triggering an immediate protest from Lu’s office. CNN later replaced the headline by “Lu seeks to be first Taiwan woman president” as protests poured in.
Without releasing the original text of the letters, the news release cited Curley as saying that AP would like to interview Lu and make corrections without hesitation if the report in question contained faults in citation or translation. Curley said AP did not agree with the attacks on Lu it cited, that it respected the significant position the Taiwanese government and people had in the Asia and Pacific region, and that covering Taiwan’s presidential election would be a major task for AP in Asia in the coming year.
On the CNN letter, the news release cited Cramer as saying that CNN had no intention of being derogatory to Taiwan or Lu, that it should not have used AP’s wording as its headline, that it had swiftly changed the headline and that it had published an announcement explaining its change of headline before ever being challenged.
In an interview with cable TV channel TVBS on Wednesday, Lu said she could not understand why AP was using words which China used to criticise her in 2002.
Annette Lu, 63, is one of four candidates from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party to run in the primaries in the spring of 2008. A former dissident and lawmaker, Lu was branded “scum of the nation” by China’s Taiwan expert Liu Jiayan in a 2002 article for her declarations of independence for Taiwan, which China deems its province, and condemnations of China’s missile threat.
On Thursday, Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian criticised AP and CNN for the “biased’“ story on Lu. “I believe that any professional media group would not quote Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s words to criticise or attack US President George W Bush, and use Chavez’s words as the headline. But such an unfortunate thing has happened to Vice President Lu,” Chen said.
