This weekend the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents’ Club holds its annual meeting and it needs a quorum of just 10 people. Government departments sometimes struggle to meet their quorums for international media when sponsoring feel-good trips to see floral exhibits or the Taipei zoo’s baby panda. Foreign media journalists are becoming endangered in Taiwan because the once volatile island now lacks steady flows of news of interest to mass-market overseas audiences.
But the “no news is good news” theory doesn’t hold up. Media still cover Taiwan. They just pick the grim stories, not the flowers.
Taiwan today isn’t the trouble spot that it once was. From the 1950s through the 1970s skirmishes with China over outlying islands put it on the news map. Reporters were seldom allowed then in Communist China, which was trying to take Taiwan as a final victory over the Nationalist Party that had fled there after civil war in the 1940s. Taiwan, formally the Republic of China, was also a UN member and a high-end US ally into the 1970s, bringing more news coverage. Former presidents Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian ensured foreign media coverage through 2008 by antagonizing China with calls for stronger self-rule.
But by 2010, two years into the term of President Ma Ying-jeou, the China threat was on hold indefinitely and news about once unthinkable China-Taiwan economic ties arranged by Ma’s government had lost novelty value. China was also letting in more journalists, lured by a glut of stories about change and risk. Taiwan was written off as stable. “The low coverage of Taiwan suggests that Taiwan is no longer a trouble spot with surprises as it used to be,” says Leonard Chu, a China media studies professor retired from National Chengchi University in Taipei.
Today fewer than 30 foreign media journalists belong to the correspondents’ club. The number of regularly employed foreign journalists in Taiwan is falling as media organizations decide against replacing people who quit or relocate. “If Club membership can be regarded as a valid sample, then numbers have been dropping,” says Club President Martin Williams.
No news should be good news. But Taiwan is still covered when signs of instability resurface. News media know the dispute with China is just paused, not over. They’re mindful that this western Pacific island forms the world’s 26th largest economy, a barometer for world export demand and a global high-tech hardware hub. Taiwan faces no danger of being covered like a small country in Latin America or even bigger ones in Asia. “You could argue Taiwan gets more than its fair share of international media coverage, perhaps, because of its unique, long-term political standoff with Beijing,” says Sean King, senior vice president with consulting firm Park Strategies in New York. “For example, Thailand, with which Taiwan is sometimes confused, has three times as many people. But unless it’s a Thai election or a colored shirt protest in Bangkok, I’d say Taiwan regularly gets just as much coverage if not more than Thailand.”
Taiwan’s sporadic bursts of internationally significant news still don’t raise the resident journalist population. Cost-wary Western media organizations cover spurts of news here by phone or Internet from other parts of Asia, often Beijing or Hong Kong. Some use local freelancers or interns. In special cases editors send people to Taiwan from other bureaus. Taiwan saw these reactions when student-led protesters occupied the legislature from March 18-April 10 to block a service trade deal with China. Protesters also raised tough questions about Ma Ying-jeou’s engagement with China.
Now as Taiwan news goes back to sleep the media hot on the protest story don’t need to maintain local bureaus. The financial media will cover markets and company earnings almost every day, and Asian media will still follow the secondary political stories. But the major Western media won't be here to sniff the flowers or fawn over the panda, a letdown for government media liaisons in charge of giving Taiwan a positive image overseas. Those media will be back when the occupy-parliament protesters resurface, unless a killer earthquake strikes first.
