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News media is expected to serve as the fourth estate that stays outside of political competition, holds the political powers accountable and facilitates exchanges of diverse views. Fair, balanced and objective news reports help sustain democracy by formulating cross-pressure and alleviating political conflicts. Unfortunately, research has shown that media biases favoring certain political forces are prevalent across democracies. As the critical foundation of democracy is eroding, it begs the question of what accounts for the political biases in news reports. We argue that the sources of media biases can be multiple, and each determines the patterns and levels of the media biases in certain periods. Drawing on a novel text corpus of over 50000 titles of political news from four major news outlets in Taiwan between 2004 and 2020, we test three different parameters that might explain the variation in media bias. First, news biases may reflect political swings, namely, appraising the winning party or hitting the one that is falling down. As such, the pattern of cross-time variation in biases may be similar across different news outlets. Second, news biases may result from the selective exposure of the readers with certain political views. As the intensity of political rivalry escalates, the news may be more biased toward the extremes of the political spectrum in order to meet the demand from the readership that holds more polarized views. Finally, the degree of news biases may vary when there is a change in the ownership or management of the media outlet. Jointly, political swings, electoral competition and changes in ownership/management have played important roles in shaping the ebbs and flows of the news biases in Taiwan. This research presents a systematic analysis of less-studied longitudinal variation in news titles from multiple news outlets. Our findings also make contribution to studies of communication and democratic consolidation by identifying the contingent sources of media political biases in a young democracy.