Rich pickings

Plunging Taiwan into a media-induced nightmare, TV stations recently played the same video over and over - a man dressed in black delivering food offerings from a Taipei municipal funeral hall to restaurants. Taiwanese often eat leftover offerings from ordinary biweekly and holiday sacrifices, but offerings to the dead - especially other people's deceased - are generally taboo. TV cameras zoomed in on eateries as narrators asked if the patrons might be unknowingly eating the food of the dead.

Apoplectic city councillors, led by Wang Yu-cheng, screamed at Taipei's mild-mannered mayor, Ma Ying-jeou, asking him if he thought that reselling the rice placed at the feet of the dead was acceptable. It is thought that the dead eat this last meal so they can make the long journey to the dark courts of judgment.

As a result, revulsion to recycling the food of the dead was practically universal in a society where people from all walks of life believe in demons, witchcraft and geomancy. Restaurants were empty and a pale Mr Ma ate braised pork on rice at a street stall to reassure the public.

But revulsion turned to outrage when it was revealed that the deliveries had been staged. Police traced a scooter in the video to Mr Wang's assistants, and he admitted they had re-enacted what they claimed was a real abuse. Mr Wang, the former host of an investigative TV news magazine, was forced to resign from his political party.

The media originally cast Mr Wang as a young crusader against corrupt traditional practices tolerated by an ineffectual administration in Taiwan's showcase city. Taipei prides itself on running modern funeral halls where families can conduct services for their dead without being subjected to the extortionate practices that plague other cities. Mr Wang was exposing corruption behind the facade of modernity. Taiwan's media, always hungry for the juicy ratings that a good scare delivers, went along for the ride.

After the scam was exposed, an embarrassed media turned on Mr Wang with righteous anger, denouncing him as a cynical politician who had (gasp) tried to manipulate the media for his own ends. This rewriting of the script not only deflected public attention from the media's failure to check the original story, but also obscured the unholy symbiosis between politics and the media in Taiwan. Journalists and TV personalities regularly win elections, while former politicians host their own shows.

The jaded but mildly titillated public, meanwhile, settled back into the daydream that politics is a reality show whose moral is that of the 18th-century novel, Dream of the Red Chamber - fiction is truth and truth is fiction.