IP: Press coverage of Japan and the USA [worth reading djf]

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Sun, 15 Oct 1995 13:35:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ellis S Krauss <krauss+ () pitt edu>


I was in process of changing my email address to receive fukuzawa so
came in at tail end of discussion of press coverage, TR Reid, etc.
But some of Mr. Burress' assumptions about press coverage of
Japan by US disturbed me because they implied all sorts of bias
rampant in Americanm press. "Bias" is often in the eye of the
beholder and one person's "bias" is another's objective reporting.


There has been at least one systematic study of US and Japanese
coverage of each other in the press [and other in tv coverage]
by the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs a couple of years ago
and in which I participated. The study did a content analysis of
7 months of the coverage of 3 friction issues in US-Japan relations
[FSX, SII, and purchase of Rockefeller Center and Columbia pictures by
Japanese firms]. The results may surprise many, including Mr. Burress:
1)most reports on both sides of the Pacific were relatively
unbiased and objective
2)when they weren't, Japanese coverage was more biased than American
coverage.
3)each country's press tends to achieve 'balance' in different
ways: The Japanese press by not presenting any opinion at all
in their generally short and factual articles; the American press
by countering one opinion with its opposite.


The real problem with American coverage is not its "bias" so much
as in its lack of coverage of Japan and its tendency to cover
Japan only as a business and economic story, rather than as a
political, societal, and cultural story. Most coverage of Japan
is on the business pages [this too was shown in the study].


Those interested in the results of this study can write the
Mansfield Center [its title is called "Communicating Across the Pacific"
as I recall] or refer to my article with Stanley Budner in the April
issue of ASIAN SURVEY which is based on these results.


People have a tendency to make generalizations about the media
based on their own subjective views in ways they tend not to do about
other subjects, I've noticed. This is fine when we don't have any
systematic data on the subject, but we do in this case.
And it doesn't conform to what a lot of people like to believe.
We should be worrying as much about "America bashing" in the Japanese
press as we legitimately do about "Japan bashing" in the US press.
Best, Ellis