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.
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