12/08/2026
CIRIS STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF TAIWANPLUS AMID PROPOSED LEGISLATIVE YUAN FUNDING CUTS
August 12, 2026
The Center for Information Resilience and Integrity Studies (CIRIS) expresses its full support for TaiwanPlus, Taiwan's English-language public broadcasting platform, as it faces proposed budget cuts and funding freezes before Taiwan's Legislative Yuan that could eliminate its operations entirely.
CIRIS has reviewed reporting indicating that lawmakers are considering cuts and freezes exceeding NT$1 billion (approximately US$31 million) to the Public Television Service (PTS) and its subsidiary platforms, with proposals that would remove nearly all government funding for TaiwanPlus specifically. We note that Reporters Without Borders and the Public Media Alliance have already warned that such cuts would weaken Taiwan's ability to provide reliable public-interest journalism and would constitute "a significant loss at a time of growing disinformation".
TaiwanPlus is not a peripheral media outlet. It is one of the few English-language platforms consistently producing independent, fact-based coverage of cross-strait affairs, Indo-Pacific security, and Taiwanese civil society for international audiences who would otherwise rely primarily on state-affiliated PRC narratives or thinly sourced wire coverage. Its erosion would not be a routine fiscal matter, as this would hand an uncontested narrative advantage to Beijing's sustained, well-resourced effort to define how the world understands Taiwan, cross-strait tensions, and the wider region, at precisely the moment Three Warfares (三种战法) and cognitive domain operations (认知域作战) targeting Taiwan and its partners are intensifying.
International analysts and former diplomats associated with the American Foreign Policy Council have already characterized the funding fight in these terms, framing it as a contest over whether Taiwan can hold its ground in the global battle over narratives, not merely a line-item budget dispute. CIRIS shares this assessment. A platform's independent English-language reporting function is itself a piece of regional cognitive-security infrastructure — one that Manila, and the wider Indo-Pacific, has a direct stake in preserving.
As an independent Philippine watchdog for information integrity and democratic resilience, CIRIS treats the erosion of credible, independent public media anywhere in the Indo-Pacific as a matter of shared concern, because narrative vacuums left by defunded independent outlets are rarely filled by neutral parties. They are filled by actors with an interest in shaping perception to their own advantage.
We therefore state plainly: TaiwanPlus fills a demonstrable gap in reliable, English-language reporting on Taiwan and cross-strait affairs for regional and global audiences, including in the Philippines, where accurate framing of developments across the Taiwan Strait bears directly on Philippine security and public understanding. Defunding or eliminating TaiwanPlus at this juncture would not be a neutral fiscal decision. This would materially favor actors, principally the PRC/CCP propaganda and United Front Work apparatus, that benefit from reduced independent scrutiny and a narrower range of accessible, credible narratives on Taiwan. CIRIS joins Reporters Without Borders, the Public Media Alliance, INPUT, and other organizations and members of civil society in urging Taiwan's Legislative Yuan to reconsider the scale of the proposed cuts and to preserve TaiwanPlus's continued operation, consistent with the broader public interest in information integrity across the region. We encourage fellow watchdog, media-integrity, and civil-society organizations across the Indo-Pacific to likewise register their concern, recognizing that the resilience of independent media in one frontline democracy strengthens the information environment of all of them.
CIRIS's own frameworks for cognitive security and democratic resilience draw explicitly on Taiwan's whole-of-society model, from their civic-tech co-governance experiments to its resilience committees. TaiwanPlus is part of that same ecosystem: a public-interest information asset built to withstand, rather than amplify, cognitive and narrative pressure from hostile external actors. Its continuity is relevant not only to Taiwan's own democratic resilience but to the shared cognitive-security architecture that frontline democracies in the Indo-Pacific are working, individually and together, to build. CIRIS calls on Taiwan's legislature to weigh the proposed cuts against this broader strategic context, and stands ready to support any regional civil-society or watchdog effort to advocate for TaiwanPlus's continued operation.
