IAPMR’s Statement of Support for TPS

17 August 2026

To: Mr Yuan-Hui Hu, Chairman of PTS Board Directors

The International Association of Public Media Researchers (IAPMR) expresses profound concern and strong opposition to the legislative budget cuts to Taiwan’s Public Television Service (PTS). IAPMR is a large international community of researchers, policymakers and practitioners working collaboratively to clarify, support and facilitate the contemporary development of Public Service Media (PSM) in the digital environment.

IAMPR is collaborating this year with colleagues at PTS as a co-sponsor of the forthcoming RIPE@2026 Conference in Taipei (20-23 October 2026). PTS is partnered in the project with Taiwan’s leading university for media research, the College of Communication at National Chengchi University (NCCU). This reflects the forward-looking community of researchers and practitioners engaged in a significant case of successful academic-industry collaboration in the Asia-Pacific region. IAPMR’s large, diverse international community of scholars, experts, and policymakers appreciate the irreplaceable importance of PTS in supporting Taiwanese public discourse, cultural exchange, disaster relief communications, professional media production, and international cooperation with PSM organizations around the world. PTS significantly contributes to Taiwan’s healthy and vital democracy.

PTS serves a range of uniquely important functions that especially include nurturing and promoting Taiwan’s domestic culture, strengthening and safeguarding the country’s democratic interests and practices, providing media services that commercial firms find unprofitable but have social value beyond economic prosperity, and helping Taiwan contend with an increasingly powerful and global media conglomerates in the 21st century. Neither commercial media nor state media can provide, on their own, the range and quality of media services needed in Taiwan today. Commercial media are important but prone to market failures for services that aren’t profitable enough, while state media are often not trusted by a significant proportion of people in any society. 

As a genuinely independent and professional public service provider, PTS plays a distinctive and irreplaceable role in cultivating a healthy, peaceful, informed, and enlightened population. It facilitates civil society discourse, encourages social cohesion, promotes national identity and cultural development, supports the preservation of cultural heritage, and contributes to a healthy domestic media-production sector.

It is important to observe that PTS is internationally recognised as one of the most significant cases of successful public service media development in the 21st century.  In fact, it is a case that other countries without long-established public-service broadcasting traditions and institutions look to for inspiration and aspiration. Taiwan is arguably the most successful project of building a contemporary public media system from scratch that is properly aligned with its domestic democratic and cultural context. The importance of this achievement has been documented in influential books and articles. PTS has distinctive importance in scholarship about media, democracy, and the public interest today.

There are few things more important to any country’s future than the health, education, and well-being of its people, especially the most vulnerable, which includes children, the elderly, and minority groups.  The value of social responsibility in media provision cannot be measured solely in financial terms, especially in today’s digital environment that is rife with mis- and disinformation, cyber-attacks, increasingly sophisticated propaganda, and an industry characterized by international consolidation. While IAPMR recognises that budget reductions are sometimes necessary in response to broader economic conditions, we express grave concern that reductions in funding, even if less drastic than initially proposed, will affect the organisation’s capacity to sustain the breadth and quality of its public service functions, which has broad and worrisome implications for the health and vitality of Taiwan’s democracy and future as a society.

For these reasons, IAPMR respectfully urges the relevant authorities in Taiwan’s leadership to ensure that, going forward, PTS retains the resources and institutional capacity necessary to fulfil its important public-service mission.

Signed