Abstract
In recent years, journalism in Japan has been criticizing government's various public projects, and their articles and programmes sometimes should be called “public-policy-bashing”. In this study, we took the Toyosu market relocation issue as a case of public-policy-bashing. After a torrent of criticism against the relocation project, experts concluded that the project was not causing any severe risks. That means the basis of criticism has been denied, but the criticism continued. We analyzed how media and journalists selected the tones of criticizing and changed them. The analysis of quantitative data from TV programmes and newspaper articles suggested that the journalism had changed their flame of criticism from “risk of relocation” to “problems in the due process of the project”, and continued the bashing despite of experts' positive reports. In addition, our theoretical discussion suggested that their flame change was a result of the process of reducing cognitive dissonance.
