The use by prosecutors and media of labels such as “cult,” “religious fraud,” and “brainwashing” created serious problems for several spiritual groups, including Tai Ji Men.
by Willy Fautré*
*A paper presented at the international webinar “Media as Friends and Foes of FoRB—and the Tai Ji Men Case,” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on May 8, 2024, after World Press Freedom Day (May 3).
An article already published in Bitter Winter on May 15th, 2024.
The well-known human rights NGO Reporters Without Borders has just published its annual report and country ranking, in which it stressed that a growing number of governments and political authorities are not fulfilling their role as guarantors of the best possible environment for journalism and for the public’s right to reliable, independent, and diverse news and information. Taiwan, which was ranked in the 35th position, last year jumped to the 27th position this year.
Media reporting about religious issues is controversial in many countries, including in democratic countries, despite national ethical guardrails and international standards.
The United Nations, the European Court of Human Rights, the EU Court of Justice, and other international instances use neutral terminologies to name any religious or belief communities in their declarations, reports, or court decisions.
Media can be friends when they abide by professional ethical norms, but they can also be enemies when they serve vested interests.
The repeated use, without restraint, of derogatory terms with strongly negative connotations is one of the tools privileged by a number of media outlets to name non-mainline religious or belief groups, to qualify their identity, or to misrepresent their beliefs and practices. Those terms are known: cult, horror cult, destructive cult, guru, mental manipulation, mind control, coercive persuasion, exploitation of the devotees, and so on.
Behind such unethical practices, we often find disgruntled former members who out of revenge want to destroy the image of a movement they may have been part of for many years. They tell stories—true, false, exaggerated, or biased —which can be attractive for the media wanting to increase the readership of their printed or online news and hereby consolidate their financial situation. The consequences of this “win-win deal” and complicity between these two actors can however be dramatic. A few recent examples.
The misuse and the trivialization of derogatory labels have led to hostility, verbal abuse, physical assaults as well as vandalism of places of worship. Recently, there were acts of violence against community buildings of Jehovah’s Witnesses in many countries, including in France. In Germany and India, several Jehovah’s Witnesses were even killed in bomb attempts.
In Japan, Norway. and other democratic countries, a number of religious minorities are being deregistered or threatened by de-registration because of all the biased propaganda voiced by the media.
In Japan, Jehovah’s Witnesses are experiencing an over 600% increase in hate speech and hate crimes compared to the previous six years. This spike is a direct consequence of the Japanese government publicly assaulting the character of Jehovah’s Witnesses, asserting that parents teaching their religious beliefs to their children is tantamount to abuse.
For years, Tai Ji Men experienced the same problems after the judicial harassment and the media campaign of Prosecutor Hou Kuan-Jen started in 1996. Under his influence, hundreds of newspaper articles, and dozens of TV programs misportrayed Tai Ji Men as a dangerous cult in sensationalist stories ,which were very far from the reality but would sell. Tai Ji Men was then not alone in this case.
Scholars should further investigate and analyze the media campaign against Tai Ji Men, as late Professor Liselotte Frisk (Dalarna University, Falun, Sweden) did with the campaign against the MISA yoga group and their spiritual leader Gregorian Bivolaru in Finland in the framework of her paper titled “The Controversies Around Natha Yoga Center in Helsinki: Background, Causes, and Context”.
States and societies should always have a look back at the darkest pages of their history. Tai Ji Men could contribute to that.
This would be an appreciated service rendered to the Taiwanese nation as it would prevent the comeback of dark periods, which were characterized by the media’s bad habits and practices of privileging the presumption of guilt to the presumption of innocence, as if they were a legitimate court which they were not.