Blog 13: Conflict and Peace/War Journalism in Asia

*In this week, we focused on media in international conflicts. Related with this topic, I learned about Peace Journalism , which would help to avoid media conflicts. Through reading, I recognized how Peace Journalism helps the less-conflict in the international media. Of course, I don't mean to that Peace Journalism is everything that avoids conflicts between countries, but at least it helps a lot for right judgement, not to slant in one side. I think the power of domestic TV is still huge. Now has a lot of ways of getting information. Especially internet and SNS include a lot of people or organization's opinion and view points, so it seems the information is expanded more than before and selected media is of course. However, I want to say that there are still people who get information only from TV news or radio, which are relatively expanded more than internet. Internet and SNS are really active selecting of media, so we should know that there are also passive audiences. If we focus on these people, the War Journalism on TV or News papers is really dangerous, which leads to misunderstanding and conflicts so easily. During the discussion, I was thinking about the conflicts and Peace Journalism in Asia, so in this blog, I want to show some aspects of these.

-Thinking about Peace or War Journalism, in my sense the number of War Journalism is more than Peace Journalism. As one element for War Journalism, zero-sum game was picked up in our discussion, and reflecting my media experiences, zero-sum game is everywhere. "War or Peace Journalism? Asian Newspaper Coverage of Conflicts" did the survey that is based on a content analysis of 1,338 newspaper stories from 10 English-Language daily newspapers from the 5 Asian countries involved in the 4 regional conflicts: India, Pakistan, The Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. Of the 1,338 stories, 1,018(76.1%)were "hard" news stories; 134(10.0%)were features; 121(9.0%)were opinion pieces including editorials; and 65(4.9%) were others that included letters to editor and speech transcripts. Only a small number of stories-137(10.2%)- were produced by foreign wire services such as AP, CNN, BBC, Reuters, and AFP. That  the majority(1,201 or 89.8%) were produced by local sources was unsurprisingly given the conflicts' local nature. As it says, the majority of news included War Journalism aspect and there is no ending of conflicts between these countries.

-Now, shift eyes just a little bit to East. Japan and South Korea has a huge conflict called DOKDO(Korean name)/TAKESHIMA island(Japanese name) problem, which both countries claim that island as their sovereign territory.  According to FAR EAST PEACE? JAPAN, KOREA MEDIA CONFLICT & DOKDO/TAKESHIMA ISLANDS, each countries always tell a story from own country side. In other words, both countries insist that my country is right and another is wrong, which is definitely leading a zero-sum game or War Journalism. There are a lot of things that is not covered by Japan or South Korea to justify themselves. This shows perfect example that news creates some slanted perception to the people. War Journalism is so dangerous, but actually everywhere in the world.
-There are a lot of causes of many amounts of War Journalism, and in the discussion, we came up with the idea that zero-sum game is so simple that people can understand easily, that's why it happens. In addition that, I think that Media Free also leads such a journalism. Of course, because of Media Free, people can tell and know many kinds of information, but at the same time Media Free means easiness to be controlled by journalists, media persons, or even country itself. Everyone likes own country, hope own happiness, and believe their justice. If they were said that Media is free, and they can say anything they want, they definitely would claim that my country is justice and right. According to Conflict, Terrorism and media in Asia, in the freer media in the region, the origins of this failure, or deliberate bias, are also a result of deficiencies in media practice. In particular, reporters often fail to question and assess the material that they receive from official sources.(P120) It indicates that Media Free's weak point and one of causes of War Journalism, I guess.
-In sum up, present international media world is still filled with War journalism. But it is also true that Peace Journalism exists and many people are trying to construct it. Only some decades ago, our world had actual war everywhere, and now it is occurred in the media world. Now is just a beginning, it should be taking a time for Peace Journalism to be expanded everywhere, such as actual Peace. However, Globalization would help this Peace Journalism movement, because it means cooperate between countries. At least I believe it and hope, after some decades, Peace Journalism will be of course in the world.

Blog 12: US news in East Asia

* This week, I learned about the US news in other countries. The video, which is  people from all over the world are interviewed about the image of America, was really interesting. Of course, the perception is really different from each people, but as I learned in class, I agree with that the main image of America is powerful, military based or violence. And I think, these images are created from news a lot. I cannot say all of images, but still a lot of parts of images were born from news' reports. For discussion, I looked up US news in  East Asia from Watching America. I didn't know there is the web site that every countries' news about US are translated in English, but I think it is really US peculiar thing because enough news are needed to make such a page from all over the world. I tried to search the same kind of web page in Japanese, but I couldn't find out. In my opinion, the reason why so many countries have US news is that US definitely has a lot of strong connections with each country, economically and politically. That's why the topic related with government is more than culture. And the relationship with US influences people around the world, because the relevant with people is huge reason why international news are dealt with, as I mentioned in Blog 11. In this blog, I did a little more research about the relationship between US and East Asia.

- I looked up 5 news from Watching America, which are 2 from South Korea, 2 from China, and 1 from Japan. The interesting thing was that each countries mentioned about the power relation between US and China. Right now, the superpower of China is a big topic, especially in Asia. I saw an article saying even "China is a new leader of global economy." I guess the reason why South Korea and Japan picked up this same topic, even though they are not related with directly,  is that these countries have many connections with each China and US. So the tension between China and US influences South Korea and Japan a lot.

-From South Korea: They say that we are in the middle, neither US nor China stand. Their biggest anxious is the issue of Korean Peninsula. The good relation with both of US and China is important for protect themselves. They don't want to be against the superpowers, because if South Korea choose one side, it means creating huge enemy. They need to focus on North Korea's power so they hope stable relations with both countries.
-From Japan: Japan is relatively standing US side. If you see Pew Research Center's report, it is accurate that the view of US in Japan is positive, like 85% people said favorable US in 2011. Also Japan's stand point is calmness, like not slanted to neither US nor China. China states that their superpower is new and US is old, but Japan insists that China's economic development or political value are still old style so US doesn't need new slogan toward China.
- Pew Research Center article provides interesting survey about "How Americans and Chinese view each other". It says " Over the past year, public opinion survey in US and China have shown evidence of rising tensions between the two countries on a host of issues." Some research shows each negative perception of economic and trade policies, which creates the difference of conveying news in each country.

- As I expected, the relationship between countries are affecting the way of conveying the news about US in each country. These differences have danger of leading misunderstanding about country or people. We have a lot of choices and ways to get information, so we need to be careful not to misunderstand from only one source or slanted view point.

Blog 11: International news in the US

* In this week, we learned and discussed about international news in the US. This topic was really interesting for me because I had never watched the news with such a view point. But once I payed attention about the international news here in US, I noticed some trends. I have a lot of ideas and interesting about this topic, but I cannot tell everything here so I will focus on the question, " Why is there a difference of the amount of information depend on the regions?"

-In the class discussion, many classmates suggested the answer that relevance or potential involvement influence the difference. I really agreed with that, because generally saying, the reason why people are trying to get news informations, included both of domestic and international, is that they need to know these informations in order to avoid the danger, which is a human nature to survive. Thus, people tend to seek the informations that relate with them directly or indirectly.  For the discussion, I was going through the NBC international news wed page, and counted the number of countries dealt in this page. Not only NBC, but also another main news networks' web sites have the trend that the news about Europe or Middle East are much more than other regions, such as Asia, Oceania, Africa or even Latin America.
-Why was it happened? Because the amount of relationship is really different depend on the regions. I think there are some elements to decide the quantity of relationship with US.  First of all, the physical distance influences a lot. So the Europe news in US is huge and Asia and Oceania are a little. Next suggestion about the element of difference of international news is the weight difference of influence to the US. Latin America and Africa are less information, even though their physical distance are near enough. This suggestion explain the reason, I think. At first, I felt weird about the less news of latin America and Africa because these places are near to US and I guessed there is a relevant enough. But then, I listened to other's opinion and the reason why I could understand this situation was because these regions is not against US a lot, which means less danger to US people, and these countries are still developing and there are not so much influence to US. This element shows the less involvement, so it did make sense of a little information of Latin America and Africa in US. Finally, I want to inform about the reason why many news of Middle East is happened in US, even though the physical distance is big like Asia or Oceania. I researched and found the interesting suggestion. Global Connection. U.S. Foreign policy explains the reason of strong connection between Middle East and US. It says "For most of 20th century and now into the 21st, the US has had global interests and a global reach to match. In the Middle East, the US has made itself a key player by using its diplomatic, economic, and military power in support of its national interests" Following this explanation, there are a lot of proofs of historical and cultural connection. This is the final element about relationship that I want to mention in this blog. Middle East and US are connected strongly by some cultural backgrounds so naturally news about Middle East are getting bigger. In sum up, US is physically near to Europe and culturally near to Middle East, therefore the international news about these regions are relatively more than other places.

-As the proof that it isn't happen only in US, I looked up Japanese news network, NHK's international news page, and watched how different between countries. The news of US is the most followed by China, South Korea, Iran and Myanmar. Almost the Asia dominants the international news in Japan, which is because these are physically near and historically have many relations as well. The biggest number of news is about US, and this is because Japan has strong historical or cultural connection with US, such as ally of US, even though there is a long distance.

-Of course, these trends were found out from only one day's news, but I guess these trend would apply generally because at least people pay attention to the news of countries that have strong relation with own countries, just like I mentioned earlier in this blog.