Media and the LDP

　Media and the Liberal Democratic Party by Ryosuke Nishida .

  The Minister of  Internal Affairs and Communications referred to stopping the radio waves of broadcasting stations, and big newscasters stepped down from their programs, and a suspicious smell drifted into the relationship between politics and the media. A good book to get a grasp on.

  This book is about how the "familiarity" of politics and the media as demonstrated by reporters clubs and the beat reporter system is changing in the era of the Internet and social media, the LDP especially, has established a continuous relationship with the media.

 In 2000, around  the same time the government formulated the IT basic strategy, the LDP shifted from election by intuition to emphasizing data. Especially in the second Abe Cabinet, they launched a new public relations strategy with professionals and made an in-house  communication strategy team.

  However, the Democratic Party of Japan seemed to have no explicit publicity strategy like the LDP, although they did try to hold more open press conferences when they were in power. Even though they had an opportunity after the ban was lifted on election campaigning on the internet, it was Liberal Democratic Party who realized this strategy when they came back into power, which showed that they  were also behind in dealing with IT.

  What especially caught my eye, was the description of the public relations budget. An analysis of how the government and ruling party are strengthening their relationship with the media, in 2015 the government public relations budget was at 8.3 billion yen, and each ministry and agency also has their own budget, amounting to tens of billions of yen.

  Sponsors of tens of billions of yen are clients with great power, and the relationship between the media and politics should be viewed not only from as a power structure but also from the perspective of business and money. And its influence is really huge. The politicians intentionally use that power, and the media is manipulated in silence.

　Politics (Liberal Democratic Party) is showing a clearly strategic change towards the media and the internet. On the public side, people unite on the internet and carry out demonstrations, and even if their not exactly successful in that regard, this seems to be a sign of a change in how people relate to politics.

　Here the author says that "what has not changed significantly has been the media." I agree. Rather, the circumstance is one that  seems to be a gradual degeneration where even when the administration throws a softball the media shrinks away. In contrast, the author sees news distribution applications such as NewsPicks and SmartNews as "new revolutionaries." Can we count on them?

　This book also mentions government involvement according to Broadcasting Law, the independent regulatory commision theory such as the US FCC and measures to strengthen the third party organization "BPO". There has long been controversy over the current system in Japan, including the Independent Committee system. After my history of overseeing such matters, I made the decision to quit the goverment, so this conversation could become very long, but I will stop myself here.

　However, further strengthening the BPO that was made as a wisdom for that placement is another good example of the Japanese style of wisdom. How to take distance oneself from politics, how to distance oneself from the net, this should be considered as our next homework.