This study examines the framing of fake news in Japanese news media by constructing a quantitative chronicle of how it has been depicted in Japanese newspapers using an exploratory approach. Two frames were identified using semantic network analysis on 1,624 articles about fake news published in the four largest Japanese national newspapers from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2021. The first frame depicts fake news mainly as an American political issue focusing on President Trump, the news media, and elections in the US. This frame was the main discourse in the articles published in 2016 and 2017. From 2018 onwards, the focus of the articles shifted to the second frame, which depicts fake news as social problems that emerged from internet information. This frame provides readers with a more nuanced understanding of the fake news phenomenon not only in the US but also in Japan. These findings contributes to the effort in the development of critical media literacy education, particularly in Japan.

In the United States, an international submarine cable landing point, the involvement of an informal interagency organization called “Team Telecom” in the U.S. Federal Communications Commissionʼs (FCC) submarine cable landing license review has been a contentious matter. Team Telecom was abruptly formalized in 2020, and in response, the State Department also revised its involvement in the review in 2022, a move that will strengthen the review process like no other license reviews. This study attempted to elucidate the origin and development process of the Team Telecom review using FCC records to recapture the actual situation of the licensing process to ensure the predictability of future reviews. The results revealed the evolution of Team Telecomʼs screening process, which emerged and developed after the State Department-led screening framework became a formality, with the reviews of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). In line with the new institutional theory, the power of the State Departmentʼs institutional shift of “drift” and “conversion” was observed, along with changes in Team Telecomʼs review process. By capturing this new contemporary “executive branch involvement,” in which the State Department conducts a layered review after the Team Telecom review, we argue that there is likely to be greater uncertainty in the review process in future and that there will be a need to keep a close eye on the State Department.