Japan's climate change media coverage and politics

Climate change is environmental issue which people cannot see or sense directly. Consequently, media coverage will often play a significant role for the progress and stagnation of its politics. An international research project COMPON will therefore analyze both media and politics and these interactions.

We handle Japanese case and found the differences of article types by publication, categorized by both of primary topic and regional scale. Asahi mainly highlights local problem and Asia, and also emphasizes the importance of changing culture. Yomiuri provides domestic news related economic interests. As an economic newspaper, Nikkei focuses on national policy-making discuss, and economic and energy related issues.

We calculated articles proportion by primary frame. The proportion of policy-making frame was more than half, and especially 66% in 2009. We suppose that this ratio was bigger than any other countries. Instead,  “science and technology” and “civil society” categories were remarkably less than 5%.

The annual frequency of climate change articles by publication shows four peaks in 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2008. 1997 is the year the Kyoto Protocol was adopted. 2001 is the year the US withdrew from the Protocol. 2005 is the year this Protocol was enacted. The rapid increasing number after 2007 and declining after 2008 is a common trend with other countries.

We checked which organizations have strong influence on climate change debate using by the DNA’s Co-Occurrence algorism. The result reflects media’s cognitive map on the influence of each organizations related. It shows that Japanese government and business individual companies are major players of the climate change policy making. Whereas we found any political parties or major NGOs are not major key players. The weak influence of political parties and politicians is very specific to climate change policy making process in Japan.