Holding Out Hope for Journalism in Taiwan
Holding Out Hope for Journalism in Taiwan
The joys and sorrows of the Taiwanese fixers who help foreign media cover their home country.
As international attention has turned to Taiwan as a possible flashpoint for superpower confrontation, this has brought a wave of new foreign correspondents to the once-neglected nation. For the local fixers who make connections happen, this has brought opportunities, but also frustrations. In our first special feature for Lingua Sinica, journalist Xin-yun Wu explores what Taiwanese can learn from these newcomers — and what they should do to better understand Taiwan.
It was well past midnight when a friend overseas, someone who had never before brought up politics with me, frantically called to ask if I was OK. “Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is all over the news,” he said, referring to the then-speaker of the US House of Representatives, who had arrived in Taipei just a few hours earlier on an Air Force passenger jet. “Will China attack you?”
On my friend’s television screen, it seemed that tensions in the Taiwan Strait were reaching fever pitch, so naturally he was concerned that his friend half a world away was staring death in the face. As I crawled back into bed, I assured him that everything here in Taipei was normal. Being threatened by an authoritarian superpower? For us Taiwanese, this is an everyday experience.
Also an everyday experience, unfortunately, is the realization that people generally around the world have little to no idea about what’s happening in our country — or for that matter, where it even is. But the furor over Pelosi’s Taiwan visit was for me and many other Taiwanese the first time we sat up and took notice. Things were changing.
Saturated and Sensational
After China began expelling foreign journalists in 2020, a growing number of them chose to relocate to Taiwan, the nearest country with a shared language. At the same time, Beijing’s imposition of a harsh national security law in Hong Kong drove some bureaus to move staff out of the long-time regional hub — and again, Taiwan seemed an obvious alternative.
As Taiwan is increasingly seen as a flashpoint that could spark the next major global conflict, more and more roving correspondents and freelance reporters have touched down here as well. All bring with them new ways of working and new professional standards, that both benefit and challenge local journalists.
For those who are familiar with Taiwan, it’s no secret that most mainstream media outlets here lack credibility and have a reputation for poor ethics — a fact that working journalists confront on a regular basis. During my work as a researcher for Made in Taiwan, a new English-language cookbook by Clarissa Wei and Ivy Chen, the most common question I got from restaurant owners was whether they needed to pay us for interviews. Jenjey Chen, vice president of Taiwan’s official Central News Agency, confirms that this is part of the media culture here. “Many media outlets in Taiwan do embedded marketing stories, especially TV channels,” he says. “Why did they make a video about this vermicelli noodle stand instead of the other one? It’s usually because they paid.”
Sensationalism and narrowness are issues too. With a population of 23 million, Taiwan has no fewer than eight 24-hour news channels, most of them privately owned. This highly saturated and competitive media environment leads to sensationalist, clickbait-oriented journalism. Most of this news — to use the term liberally — is hyper-local in focus, and Taiwanese media generally have little interest in reporting international news.
For Taiwanese journalists who yearn to report meaningful international stories, this insular outlook has long been a source of frustration. So it stands to reason that the sudden arrival of journalists from abroad to report real stories the world suddenly cares about, and without deeper local knowledge, is an added source of friction.
The Same Old Story
Often, journalists working for international outlets parachute onto the scene without first trying to better understand the lay of the land, says Afore Hsieh, a former editor who now works as a fixer. Videographers, generally expected to just shoot and edit footage, say some clients expect them to also do the work of a fixer, arranging shoots and interviews with sources. Trained local journalists also complain about being treated as mere fixers when they can play a leading role in reporting, and even have relevant area expertise.
“It can be frustrating to [local journalists] when you have been working on your connections within the semiconductor industry for years and suddenly all these foreign journalists show up and all request to interview TSMC," says Joan, a Taiwanese journalist who works for a US-based news outlet, and who asked to remain anonymous owing to company policies on speaking publicly about her work.
I should say that I’ve read some excellent stories about Taiwan from foreign correspondents. But it’s also a shared frustration that many reporting teams come to Taiwan with a limited set of pre-written narratives and agendas. On five separate occasions working as a fixer, for example, I have arranged meetings between foreign journalists and the exact same source at a civil defense group — essentially reporting the same story.
As a fellow fixer, Afore Hsieh also shares this frustration. “They mostly want a trip to Kinmen,” she says, referring to a Taiwan-controlled island just off the coast of China’s Fujian province, “[as well as] some kind of introduction to semiconductors, and people who will talk about their sense of identity.”
“I understand these are some of the most important topics,” she adds, “but as a fixer, you start asking why they all want similar angles.”
Give and Take
Despite these frustrations, many Taiwanese journalists continue to seek opportunities to work with foreign media outlets, citing welcome differences in work culture and professional values. Afore tells me she appreciates the way most foreign media care about striking a proper gender balance in the sources they choose to interview, and how some outlets rigorously fact-check their stories before they are published — both practices she has never encountered in local media.
Another major benefit to working with foreign media is the salary, according to Joan, who with the US media outlet makes 50 percent more than her previous local salary, plus better benefits. “Even though I loved my previous job at a local outlet, the hours were much longer and I didn’t get any raise after two years,” she says.
During a podcast interview last year with The Reporter, an independent Taiwanese digital media outlet, former Taiwan Foreign Correspondents’ Club president William Yang encouraged more Taiwanese to work with foreign media outlets, which he said brought tangible benefits in terms of learning about foreign professional standards. “You’re able to participate in every step of the production. It's important to be a part of the process to understand how they operate,” he said. Local Taiwanese news assistants or fixers have a much better understanding of the local culture and language, says Yang, and their insights can help to broaden the perspectives of foreign journalists and editors. In the best-case scenario, the exchange is an opportunity for both sides to learn.
In the best-case scenario, the exchange is an opportunity for both sides to learn.
Many young journalists in Taiwan have been keen to seize this opportunity — at least when the going is good. But just as international attention on Taiwan ebbs and flows, so too does the number of gigs for freelance fixers. Many people, myself included, jumped into journalism when demand was at its highest last year, around the same time Pelosi made her Taiwan trip. This year, there has been a sharp decline, painful for some. Afore explains that a friend of hers who worked previously as a freelance fixer for foreign media outlets recently had to find full-time employment in a different field because the demand for stories about Taiwan has tapered off.
For my part, I was fortunate enough to find opportunities with correspondents based here longer-term, who could provide steady work. But others have found themselves high and dry after foreign news crews have packed up and left. Their only choices are to pack up and look for other local journalism jobs, to change professions entirely — or to hold out for the next big international story to break.
Another critically underestimated challenge for fixers is the problem of communication — not just with colleagues but also with their audiences back home. As opposed to reporting for Taiwanese media, Joan says, “You need to spend more time and effort communicating to your colleagues and readers when you’re working on local issues.” In many cases, context that is common knowledge in Taiwan will have to be spelled out laboriously, again and again, to bridge the gap, and also to find common ground between local understanding and what global audiences want to hear.
When you finally do find that common ground on reporting about Taiwan, the challenge is to master the delicate art of convincing the visiting journalists you work with — and perhaps their editors back home — that there is so much more to our country than just its relationship with China. You can also begin to feel that it’s your responsibility to inform foreign journalists when they are being reductive or misrepresenting the country. One example is the need to nudge them away from gaffes like referring to Taiwan as a more exotic Denmark.
A Learning Experience
But not every observation of Taiwanese society by a foreign reporter is so embarrassing. Sometimes, they can resonate with, and positively impact, the people they are reporting on.
Last year, for example, when CNN called Taiwan a “living hell for pedestrians,” nearly every local media outlet reported on CNN’s reporting. Even the Ministry of Transportation and Communications was asked to publicly respond. When tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Taipei this summer to demand safer streets, they cited the article. For foreign journalists, this experience of going from the reporter to the reported-on can be a jarring one.
“Taiwanese people care deeply about what foreign countries say about us,” says Jenjay Chen. “Local media often repost stories and articles about Taiwan that were in foreign media. I think it’s because we’ve been isolated for such a long time — Taiwanese people crave friendship.”
The road safety protest demonstrates how this craving for friendship can have a positive effect on local society, spurring efforts to press for reform. But there are also concerns that a sharp turn to more internationally relevant coverage by local media could make the country’s information environment even messier and more vulnerable — which further implications for local journalists.
As Taiwanese news outlets have become more attuned to the international dimension of stories about their country, they have also become prime targets for Chinese disinformation campaigns. In July, United Daily News published a story based on supposed leaked minutes from a secret government meeting between Taiwanese and US officials, in which the US asked Taiwan to manufacture biological weapons, which were later denied by both parties. Taipei suspected the story could have been planted by Beijing.
“The mainstream media here in Taiwan faces ongoing distractions from disinformation warfare,” Jenjey Chen says. “This definitely makes local journalists’ jobs more difficult.” Adding foreign media outlets from all over the world to this mix could muddy the waters further and give political parties or people with ulterior motives more ways to manipulate public opinion — something the fast-food style of reporting that is prevalent in Taiwan’s mainstream media culture also does little to help.
Earlier this year, a former lawmaker mistook a tweet by a US radio talk show host about America’s “plan for the destruction of Taiwan” as a DC policy statement. The tweet itself was no more than a bad joke, but after the lawmaker posted about it on Facebook, the story was picked up by Taiwanese outlets, Chinese state media, and even the PRC Foreign Ministry. While our media is becoming internationally relevant, we are still far from meeting International standards of professionalism.
But that shortfall could also present an opportunity to not only learn from each other but also help each other.
“I have close friends who are foreign correspondents with whom I share resources and information,” says Tingting Liu, a Taiwanese journalist working for the news channel TVBS. Bilingual reporters like Liu can often seize the opportunity to mingle with foreign media, but in a country where low wages and onerous hours are a national concern, not everyone has the bandwidth to do so. The reality is that Taiwanese and foreign journalists are often working under hugely different conditions.
Liu says that foreign journalists could help play a constructive role in this respect by more actively reaching out to their local counterparts. “Foreign correspondents often knock on [source’s] doors,” Liu says, “but sometimes it would be great if they could knock on our doors. Journalists are out there, and they help each other.”
Joan agrees that many local media workers are hemmed in by their circumstances. She tells me that there are still many journalists at Taiwanese outlets who want to tell in-depth stories — the kind that dig deeper than a lot of international coverage and defy the skewed priorities of the country’s mainstream media. “[But] they have less space and fewer resources within their companies,” she adds.
For many of Joan’s university classmates, the 2014 Sunflower movement, when students occupied Taiwan’s legislature for almost a month to demand the withdrawal of a trade pact with China, was the moment that sparked their passion for reporting. It was during that movement, in fact, that I got my first internship at a local media outlet. It was a rude introduction to the world of Taiwanese journalism.
I remember sitting in my cubicle, proofreading one story after another: the faster the better, the more vulgar the better. Despite the historic events unfolding around us, we were focused on big numbers and irrelevant minutiae, losing sight of the stories that really mattered. This tabloid-style approach, so much the norm in Taiwan, nearly made me give up on journalism. But for now, I’m holding tight — one of many local Taiwanese journalists working alongside foreign media outlets, trying our best to tell our own stories in our own voices.
Xin-yun Wu is a freelance journalist, researcher, and video producer from Taipei who is interested in Taiwanese politics, culture, and culinary history.
I loved this piece! Thank you.