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Taiwan’s Shared Media Challenge

A new documentary tackles the structural forces strangling Taiwan’s news industry — from platform monopolies and traffic-driven journalism to the advertising dollars that feed the cycle.
A screenshot from the film Spark 5: A Virtuous Cycle.

In Taiwan, the pressures bearing down on the news industry are an open secret. Platform monopolies, cutthroat competition for clicks, and an advertising market that rewards sensation over substance have hollowed out public trust in journalism. Yet these are precisely the conditions that make the problems so hard to report on and so easy to ignore.

A public interest documentary released this month by the Hsiao Tung-tzu Culture Foundation (蕭同茲先生文化基金會), a Taipei-based foundation dedicated to journalism education and press culture, is now trying to raise awareness of these issues. Spark 5: A Virtuous Cycle (星星之火5：共好的循環), the fifth installment in the foundation’s ongoing Spark series, premiered on June 4 and aired the following evening on CTS (華視), a public broadcaster. The film is the first in the series to bring advertisers, ad-tech platforms, and international news credentialing systems into its examination of Taiwan’s news ecosystem. According to a 2025 report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, public trust in news in Taiwan stands at just 30 percent, ranking 39th among 48 markets surveyed globally.

Interviewees, including journalists, technology platforms, advertising agencies and major Taiwanese brands, arrived at a shared conclusion, according to outlets reporting on the film — that the trust crisis facing Taiwan’s media is no longer a problem for the news industry alone, but a challenge facing the whole society.

David Bandurski is the director of the China Media Project, leading the project’s research and partnerships. David joined the team in 2004 after completing his master’s degree at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He is the author of Dragons in Diamond Village (Penguin/Melville House), a book of reportage about urbanization and social activism in China, and co-editor of Investigative Journalism in China (HKU Press).

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