The Beijing-friendly news television channel 52 in Taiwan will be taken off the air at midnight on Saturday after 26 years of broadcasting, following regulators’ rejection of its license renewal for error-prone reporting and repeated rule violations.

It will instead continue the work of news coverage online, having launched a chat room on YouTube on Monday.

As its last hurrah on the small screen, channel 52 on Thursday evening started airing a series of special programmes hosted by popular news anchors that would culminate in a gathering of 475 staff to bid farewell to audiences on the night of Friday, Dec. 12.

The television station is the news arm of Taiwanese cable news network Chung T’ien TV, which belongs to the Want Want China Times Group. Critics have labeled it as “red” media that favors mainland China, while regulators have imposed many fines for the station’s fake news and breaches of broadcasting rules.

Controversy over CTiTV practices became apparent in recent years, particularly after Want Want chair and founder Tsai Eng-meng went on board as a major shareholder. It was understood that Tsai directly and indirectly interfered with news production during the administration of Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou, of the political party Kuomintang.

The most contentious conflict over CTiTV’s dubious coverage was probably about local elections held in 2018. The broadcaster displayed an out-and-out bias in favor of Kuomintang candidate Han Kuo-yu, giving almost 83% of its news airtime to the man, of which nearly 95% was positive reporting, according to media calculations. Han was later elected as Kaohsiung mayor, though he lost to incumbent Tsai Ing-wen in the presidential race early this year.

The regulatory body, National Communications Commission, had punished the station many times for sensationalism and fake news propagated during its political talk shows and programmes. On Nov.18, the commission finally decided not to renew CTiTV’s license for another six years, ending the 26-year run of the news channel.

The latest is that the TV station has filed an appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court after the Taipei High Administrative Court on Monday rejected its request for an injunction to prevent the shutdown of the news channel after the expiry of its license on Dec. 11.

One academic said that the authorities had refused to renew CTiTV’s license because of its fake news, not for its opposition to the ruling Democratic Progressive Party or its support of reunification with mainland China.

The station had abused freedom of the press, and its very existence had been affecting press freedom in Taiwan, said professor Leung Man-to of the Department of Political Science at National Cheng Kung University.

The removal of the station would better protect press freedom in Taiwan as frontline journalists would no longer need to follow the instructions of big bosses to fabricate the news, Leung said.

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