AP apologizes to Taiwan's vice president over "scum" article

Mar 8, 2007, 8:19 GMT

Taipei - The US-based Associated Press (AP) news agency has apologized to Taiwan's Vice President Annette Lu for a controversial article by offering to conduct an interview with her, the Government Information Office (GIO) said on Thursday.

'AP has agreed to make balanced reporting by conducting an interview with the vice president,' GIO Director-General Cheng Wen-tsan told reporters.

AP made the decision after GIO's representative office in New York conveyed a protest letter from Lu's office to the AP headquarters on Wednesday.

According Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA), AP's editor-in-chief for international news said that AP only wanted to state that Lu was one of the candidates in the 2008 presidential election, but he regretted that the US cable TV channel CNN used 'Taiwan's 'scum of the nation' runs for president' as the headline on CNN.com, which used the AP story.

Meanwhile, Lu has also protested to CNN and is waiting for a reply.

'Vice President Lu's protest letter has been sent to CNN's headquarters in Atlanta. But the executive vice president in charge of the news department is on business leave and won't be in office until Tomorrow (Thursday US time). So CNN will decide how to respond tomorrow, at the earliest,' CNA quoted Chang Chung-jen, head of GIO's office in Atlanta, as saying.

The controversy erupted on Tuesday when Lu held a news conference to declare she would run for president in the 2008 election.

AP filed a story 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.

Lu said the CNN story had insulted her and the Taiwan people. She demanded an apology and correction and would not rule out seeking damage.

CNN later changed its headline to 'Lu seeks to be first Taiwan woman president,' but has not apologized yet.

When Lu carefully read the CNN story, she realized the root of the issue was AP, so she sent a protest letter to AP on Wednesday, demanding an apology and correction within 48 hours.

In an interview with the cable TV channel TVBS on Wednesday, Lu said she could not understand why AP was using words which China used to blast her in 2002.

Adding to this insult, Lu said, she found the AP story biased because a public opinion poll on Wednesday showed that Lu ranked number five among the ruling party's four presidential candidates and 80 per cent of those polled favoured having a woman president.

Lu said the AP story had been used by world media including CNN.com, the International Herald Tribune and the Asian Wall Street Journal.

She said she hoped AP would take prompt action to repair damage and to safeguard Taiwan's dignity. Lu called the incident 'unacceptable' and 'unforgivable' in English.

In Chinese she said both the AP and CNN were full of 'pride and prejudice.'

She said she would not let the incident pass easily because many foreign reporters were sent to Taipei from Hong Kong or Beijing and had Beijing's ideology.

When a TVBS newscaster asked if Lu would take legal action against AP and CNN, Lu said that if she did not receive a satisfactory response from both media outlets, she might take other actions like seeking help from international human rights groups or other groups.

Lu, 62, a former dissident, human rights activist and lawmaker, angered China by openly declaring that Taiwan and China are two countries and condemning China's missile threats against Taiwan as terrorism, prompting China's Taiwan expert Liu Jiayan to brand her 'scum of the nation' in a 2002 article.

In Taiwan and elsewhere she is known as a firm advocate of Taiwan's sovereignty and a brave defender of human rights and women's rights.