Advancing diversity and inclusion is one of the most critical challenges facing the media that serves the public today. It is crucial for earning trust from the audience and sustaining relevance in an era of information overload.Diversity has many dimensions: gender identity, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, mental and physical disabilities, and geographic locations, to name a few. In our first analysis of on-screen diversity in television, we focused on one of the most basic elements of diversity—gender balance, specifically, the ratio of women and men appearing on television programs, taking into consideration Japan’s slow progress in gender equality. It ranked 120th out of 156 countries in the World Economic Forum 2021 Global Gender Gap Report.We aimed to visualize the current situation through data. Drawing on our preliminary research from June 2021, we planned our study as a combination of metadata analysis and coding analysis. We used metadata to capture the broad landscape of all television programs to look at the on-screen representation of men and women by age, occupational background, and program genre. We used coding analysis for further scrutiny of gender balance in evening news programs, expanding the parameters to include roles within the news, issues addressed, and whether they were named or anonymous.Our study found that women made up less than 40% in programs overall and less than 30% among those who spoke, or whose spoken words were broadcast or quoted, in news programs The representation of women diminished further when we excluded the regular members of the news program such as news anchors. The ratio of men to women among those interviewed or quoted in news items was 3 to 1, and 4 to 1 among those whose full names were mentioned and subtitled on screen.Looking at the representation by issues, the male-female ratio was more than 3 to 1 in politics, healthcare and science, as well as sports. The gap widened again when we looked at professional backgrounds: 5 to 1 among politicians—the largest group in numbers—and, in the most extreme case, 60 to 1 among medical doctors.The disparity by age group was also stark. For women, those in their 20s had the highest representation throughout all TV programs, with a clear downward curve—the older the less represented, from the 30s onwards, whereas majority of the men appearing on TV were in their 30s through 50s. The trend was the same in news programs: the largest age group among women was 19-39 whereas the majority age group in men was 40-64. The data has confirmed what has often been raised as an issue: television programs are mostly composed of “young women and middle-aged men.”We also conducted a survey to study how viewers saw this issue. A substantial percentage of respondents in their teens to 30s, and among them especially women, said that they often or sometimes felt unhappy or uncomfortable about how television featured women and men. When asked what program genres made them react that way, their answers overlapped with the genres that had a large imbalance in male-female representations.

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The NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute (Bunken), conducted an online survey and online group interviews of research company’s survey panelists to study what kind of people are interested in language learning and what media they use in a changing media environment, collaborating with NHK Program Production Department’s Unit 1 Youth & Education—a section in charge of language program production. At the same time, we carried out a survey using NHK’s language learning website “Gogakuru” and textbooks for NHK’s language programs. In this second report, the author analyzes the survey findings on the use of NHK’s language programs and learning materials (radio and TV programs, applications, websites, and textbooks) as well as the survey responses to the “Gogakuru” website and to the textbooks published by NHK Publishing Inc. As to the publicity of NHK’s language programs and learning materials, the online survey of panelists finds that learning-English programs were known by about 60% of the respondents, and non-English programs by about 50%. Learning materials were known by about 25%. In either case, “television” had the highest percentage as a channel for the users to get to know them. Impressions of NHK’s language programs and learning materials cited by many people were: “free of charge or inexpensive to start,” “can start using right away,” and “easy and simple to use.” Many of impressions overlap with reasons for usage, but, for print learning materials, many cited “easy and simple to use” and “easier for review and look back on.” In a survey aimed at “Gogakuru” users, a common reason for their interest in learning/mastering foreign languages was “for cultural enrichment,” and that for self-motivated learning was “I can start studying free of charge or inexpensively,” showing the same tendencies found in the online survey of panelists. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, among the needs for self-motivated learning, “fitting me” was less common than in the online survey.

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Responding to the increase in audio media users on the internet, broadcasters in the world are devising strategies to penetrate into them through smart speakers featuring virtual assistants (or AI assistants—artificial intelligence voice assistants.) The online use of audio media started with personal computers and then smartphones and other mobile devices, and now the usage of smart speakers is expanding along with the development of the technology by mega IT companies such as Amazon and Google. Broadcasters have also started working on content development considering the use of smart speakers, and NPR, National Public Radio of the United States, and BBC, the UK's public service broadcaster, already offer content fitting for smart speakers. In Japan, too, broadcasters have launched a campaign promoting the use of smart speakers. This article also looks at the trend of content providers such as Spotify and Amazon Music in order to overview the current status and potential of audio media for the future.

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