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Japanese Media Report on Beijing Olympic 2: Transcript Analysis of Five Television News Programs
Last modified: 2011-06-03
Abstract
As a part of a more comprehensive research project on Japanese television coverage of China during August, 2008, when Beijing Olympic Games were held, this study analyzes news transcripts referring to China found in five evening television news programs.
The purpose of the research was two-folds. First, the study tried to find out how different were the five news programs in terms of their critical views toward China. Second, the study also tried to evaluate individual staff's remarks and comments on China so that individual anchor persons, announcers, commentators, reporters, narrators appearing in the five news programs are to be ranked according to the extent to which they expressed their critical views toward China.
Five evening television news programs broadcast in Japan were recorded during the period of August 4 through 29 in 2008 and all news segments referring to China ware converted to transcripts. Combined together, the transcripts consisted of 141,676 Japanese characters and total broadcast time was 8 hours and 40 minutes.
Transcripts were, then, analyzed by TeX-Ray(a software for analyzing Japanese sentences) and words with positive denotation and those with negative denotation were identified by the software. Based on ratios of these two types of words in various situations, PN indices were computed for each news program as well as for individual staff members appearing in each program.
An examination of PN indices of five news programs showed that two of them rather critically reported China in various aspects in contrast to the rest. An examination of PN indices of individual staff members across five television stations showed that those individuals belonging to the same station tend to cluster together, indicating that each television station’s view toward China was commonly shared by staff members and, therefore, that reporting of China by each station was carefully planned.
The purpose of the research was two-folds. First, the study tried to find out how different were the five news programs in terms of their critical views toward China. Second, the study also tried to evaluate individual staff's remarks and comments on China so that individual anchor persons, announcers, commentators, reporters, narrators appearing in the five news programs are to be ranked according to the extent to which they expressed their critical views toward China.
Five evening television news programs broadcast in Japan were recorded during the period of August 4 through 29 in 2008 and all news segments referring to China ware converted to transcripts. Combined together, the transcripts consisted of 141,676 Japanese characters and total broadcast time was 8 hours and 40 minutes.
Transcripts were, then, analyzed by TeX-Ray(a software for analyzing Japanese sentences) and words with positive denotation and those with negative denotation were identified by the software. Based on ratios of these two types of words in various situations, PN indices were computed for each news program as well as for individual staff members appearing in each program.
An examination of PN indices of five news programs showed that two of them rather critically reported China in various aspects in contrast to the rest. An examination of PN indices of individual staff members across five television stations showed that those individuals belonging to the same station tend to cluster together, indicating that each television station’s view toward China was commonly shared by staff members and, therefore, that reporting of China by each station was carefully planned.