A Reader's E-mail

I've got an E-mail by Michael Turton from Chaoyang University of Taichung, who is maintaining a blog named The View from Taiwan. In the e-mail, Michael shared his experiences about the Taiwan media and corrected a mistake in the post titled Red Packages written by me several days ago:

It's actually called a red envelope. The same system prevails in Taiwan, and you should probably add that reporters will call companies and blackmail them for $$, threatening to write a negative article about them if they don't cough up. My wife actually had that happen to her in her role as a cookbook translator! Another thing that happens are paid adverts that are presented as news stories, but which the company actually pays for. The media are a pretty sick bunch in Taiwan. Probably they are braver in China, in fact.

About a decade ago Douglas Habecker had an article in the old China News (now Taiwan News) on the red envelope system here in Taiwan. I'm not a member of your blog system, so I can't post this. But go ahead and put this in the comments if you like.

Thanks Michael Turton.

By the way, compared to the blog service providers like blogger.com or typepad.com, vox.com doesn't supply unregistered users with commenting function. So please send e-mails to flypig [at] gmail.com if you've got some advices for me and hate registering on a social networking website.