Situation 1: Ignorance

Aside from a few TV weather people who have retired from the Central Weather Bureau or the military, most weather reporters and readers are not trained in atmospheric sciences. When they handle stories about typhoons, they carelessly throw around specialized terminology and draw conclusions with only the vaguest notions of what they are talking about, creating misunderstandings and unnecessary alarm among the general public.

For example, for every typhoon that arrives from September on, the media starts talking about the "convergence effect" between northern fronts or air masses and the typhoon, predicting that this effect will bring heavier-than-usual rains down on Taiwan.

However, as Daniel Wu, director of the CWB's Weather Forecast Center explains, the term "convergence effect" refers to a very specific phenomenon: If there happens to be a northern front heading south toward the coast of northern Taiwan, this will cause northeasterly monsoon winds to become stronger. If there happens to be a typhoon heading toward the southern edge of the front, then because the typhoon rotates counterclockwise, there will be northeasterly winds in northern and eastern Taiwan. When these combine with the original monsoon winds and rain, there will be more rain than usual. "But that does not mean that every typhoon produces a convergence effect. Unfortunately the media has used the term so often that it has lost its precise meaning."

Situation 2: Distortion

On October 25, 2004, a reporter for Taiwan Television drowned while wading through a river swelled by typhoon rains. This showed how far stations in Taiwan will go to get the most provocative images to drive up audience ratings, neglecting even the safety of their own reporters.

To dramatize the storm conditions, TV reporters often go to the coastline or dangerously exposed places to use as backdrops, to give people the impression that the reporter is nearly being swept away by powerful winds. At other times reporters have crouched or kneeled in water to create the impression of devastating chest-high flooding. There have even been cases of stock footage of past disasters being cut into current storm reports to produce a chilling effect.

Kuan Chung-hsiang, chairman of the Media Watch Foundation and an assistant professor at Shih Hsin University, says that TV stations in Taiwan routinely orchestrate their reporting in such a way as to exaggerate weather or disaster conditions, unnecessarily creating greater alarm among the public. If the situation turns out to be less severe than they make it look, you get a "boy cries wolf" scenario, which makes disaster prevention work more difficult in the long run.

Legislating the weather

According to the Meteorological Act as amended in 2003, any media organization that takes it upon itself to predict a typhoon or declare a typhoon warning can be fined from NT$200,000 to NT$1 million. If a media outlet misreports announcements of the Central Weather Bureau and refuses to correct the error, it can be fined NT$100-500,000. During the years since the amended act took effect, the CWB has issued several warnings to violators, but has not imposed any fines.

Given intense market competition, the Meteorological Act seem inadequate in the face of the habit to exaggerate storms and the damage they cause. And it is going to be a very long time indeed, if ever, until the Taiwanese media learns to exercise some self-restraint.