While he was prime minister of Japan, between 2001 and 2006, Koizumi Jun’ichirō made six visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, inciting diplomatic tensions with South Korea and China. These tensions have become one of the primary foci in the field of international relations. The visits also have aroused heated discussions among the Japanese public. Scholars agree that the media play an undeniable role in forming public opinion, and this affects the decision-making of administrations. Among the significant effects of news media are intermedia consonance (Noelle-Neumann & Mathes, 1987) and the framing effect (Entman, 2004). However, few studies to date have dealt with the converging tendencies of news media in reporting with empirical data on historical issues and the framing function of editorials. Cognizant of the impact media can exert on international relations, this study explored how Asahi Shimbun and Sankei Shimbun, two of Japan’s most influential newspapers, reported on Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine. To provide a systematic analysis of Japanese news media as a constructive step toward understanding the shaping of public opinion, and using methods of correlation analysis and content analysis, we asked the following questions: (1) How much consonance existed between the two newspapers in their reports on the visits to the Yasukuni Shrine? and (2) What is the relationship between the reporting tendencies of the articles and the stances of the editorials?
To investigate intermedia consonance, we first conducted correlation analyses on the two papers’ news articles to analyze the reporting tendencies of Asahi Shimbun and Sankei Shimbun through three lenses: agenda-setting, focus, and evaluation; the results indicated that the consonance between the two newspapers was strong at the agenda-setting level but was not confirmed at the focus or evaluation levels. We then study sought evidence of the framing effect, examining how the editorials conveyed the Yasukuni Shrine visits in terms of their definition of the issue, the reason for the controversy, moral judgments, and proposed solutions. Comparisons of the articles and editorials in Asahi Shimbun with those in Sankei Shimbun revealed that the stance of editorials corresponded to the angle or bias of the news articles of their respective newspapers. The above findings imply that news articles play a complementary role in perpetuating the more obvious framing conveyed in editorials.
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