2022 Volume 100 Pages 63-74
The Japan Society for Studies in Journalism and Mass Communication (the Society) was established in 1951, and since then, it has published 99 volumes of journals entitled “JOURNAL OF MASS COMMUNICATION STUDIES.” Their contents are academic achievements and other related activities by the Society members of academics and media business professionals. This article reviewed the whole associated articles on the subject, focusing on media law and ethics, which contributed to the journals from No.1, issued in the same year of the birth of the Society, to the latest No.99. Up until the year 2021, the Society has published 530 articles in total. And among those articles, 52 were media-ethics related (9.8% of the capacity) and 38 dealt with domestic issues (7.2%), and 14 were about international matters (2.6%). The authors came to find several characteristics from those articles. As Japan had been under the control of U.S. occupation forces until 1952, especially media-related academic activities, were, even after that period, psychologically controlled by such political environment with an understanding of media-justice represented by the words: freedom of the press psychologically defined by the U.S. occupation regime. A similar situation is true in the business management of media organs. In many discussion cases, Japan’s media-related matters have been dealt with openly to contribute to such political and social frameworks. And, behind the scene, how to maintain financial and political benefits for their own media corporations has been continuously existing. And such a hidden structure has sometimes put the audience’s benefits behind. The authors tried to show such structures of Japanese media society to encourage progressive media academics and working media professionals to contribute more for the benefits of the people and the Society under the radically changing “New Information Age.” As a whole, the authors proposed 11 ways to make Japanese media performance and information age better in our daily lives against unfavorable controlling business and political powers under unprecedented media landscape.
