The free market?
Commercial television began to fill this news gap in the mid-1980s. The strong position commercial broadcasting presently holds in the news and current affairs sector is a relatively recent development in Japan. Some commercial networks had been seen as reputable and independent news providers until the 1960s, when strong pressure from political and industrial interests spelled an end to many critical news programs in the context of the social unrest around the Vietnam War and the controversy surrounding the construction of Tokyo?s international airport in Narita. By the 1970s, all private stations had discontinued news reporting and concentrated instead on the entertainment sector, so that the public broadcaster NHK came to hold a virtual monopoly on news broadcasting in Japan. This situation only changed in the mid-1980s when TV Asahi introduced a news show called "NewsStation." The makers of "NewsStation" recognized the growing public demand for political analysis and critical news reporting. By that time, some commercial broadcasting networks had grown into large media organizations, which gave them somewhat greater independence from individual industrial sponsors. While TV Asahi remains the most outspoken and controversial television network in Japan, the other media networks now also broadcast their own brand of news shows with a mix of news, opinion and entertainment. Political manipulation and press quietism
Many conservative politicians in Japan became concerned with the way commercial news broadcasting was developing. According to a report in the Mainichi Shimbun in November 1989, then-Minister for International Trade and Industry, Seiroku Kajiyama (Liberal Democratic Party), demanded at an unofficial meeting with representatives of the automobile industry that they stop sponsoring TV Asahi. Subsequently, the Japanese carmaker Toyota pulled out of its advertising agreement with TV Asahi. In 1993, the lingering conflict between some members of the Liberal Democratic Party and the commercial broadcasting sector erupted when the party attributed its first defeat in a general election since 1955 to the reporting of "NewsStation." The Liberal Democratic Party, which soon afterwards regained its dominant role in government, was so angered over TV Asahi?s alleged political bias that they tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to have TV Asahi?s broadcasting license withdrawn. But what can only be seen as a massive attempt at political manipulation and suppression of free speech and public debate was not perceived as such by Japan?s print media. Rather than analyzing the relationship between politics and the media, the print media instead criticized the journalistic qualities of television broadcasting. Critical analysts in Japan pointed to rivalries between print and electronic media and cross-media ownership as the main reasons for the print media?s failure to provide an adequate public debate on these issues. Following a major Liberal Democratic Party loss in the 1998 Upper House election, the party began monitoring the media even more closely to detect any coverage the Liberal Democratic Party deemed "unfair." The English-language newspaper The Japan Times published an article on Nov. 28, 2000, that outlined the various measures the Liberal Democratic Party was considering taking to enforce stricter "self-discipline" on the media, allegedly supported by anti-media sentiments in the general public. Such sentiments may well exist given the dramatized and sensationalized reporting of some media outlets and the disregard they show for individuals' privacy. However, within some sections of the Liberal Democratic Party, the right to individual privacy is being used as a cover to protect politicians from perfectly justifiable press scrutiny. The current Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, is (unlike many of his Liberal Democratic Party colleagues) a media-savvy politician whose favorable public profile contrasts with the limited backing he receives from within his own party ranks. The response to his recent firing of the controversial but even more popular Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka is only the latest example of the increase in political coverage on commercial television news compared to the mid-1990s, and the less restrictive attitude on the part of the ruling party to media reporting. The question is whether, amid the crowding-in of economic and social problems in Japan, the media?s new interest in political affairs and their access to the government will be sustained far beyond the media-friendly Koizumi regime. This article originally appeared at www.openDemocracy.net on Feb. 13, 2002. It is reprinted with the permission of the author, Barbara Gatzen. Gatzen is an editor for the Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies and a visiting research fellow at the Australian National University. Gatzen studied Japanese studies, linguistics and German literature in Cologne, Trier, and at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. From 1994 to 1996 she was a Monbusho research fellow at Keio University, Tokyo, and in 1998 gained accreditation as a professional translator in Australia. In 1999 she completed her doctorate in linguistics at the Free University of Berlin, with a thesis on Japanese television news. She was recently appointed as a postdoctoral research fellow at Trier University in Germany.
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