Taiwanese News

I'll say this much: Taiwanese TV news sucks.

It's like watching tabloids about current events. Big attention-grabbing fonts and letters on every screen cut, and not like CNN ticker-style informative type either -- it's like the kind you see when people are first playing around with colours and fonts on their word processor or something. And then you get the orchestral hit samples (like in Windows) to give emphasis on "shocking news", but done in a super cheap low-budget production kind of way.

And heck, the stories they cover. They're all depressing and/or alarmist news (as if the world is about to end in a horrible way) or it's largely insignificant or unimportant to the general population (like some old lady in a little town somewhere had a flood in her basement and lost her collection of puppets or something). With all of these, they seek the most useless opinions from the most under-educated people, and then represent them as if they were the norm/popular expression.

Please. And this is how the general population gets their current events??

We can talk about camera work too. Those damned cameramen spend a lot of time shooting scenes of people crying, or some part of their body that is really uninteresting (like their hands) that perhaps one might watch if one were listening to them in person to infer more (like if they were rubbing their hands together while talking). They always seem to focus on something you'd find rather irrelevant, like if you were actually on-site, but suddenly lost interest or let your mind wander. Imagine all that, with the camera stability of the Blair Witch Project or some W5 hidden-camera expose.

Taiwanese news sucks. It's no wonder I keep the TV on in the channel 65-76 range (and #5 for CNN).