The public TV station in Japan, NHK -- or Nippon Hoso Kyokai -- was until recently the main source of TV news in Japan. According to Ellis Krauss, professor in the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, "more postwar Japanese citizens may have learned about what their government does and how it does it from their public broadcaster, NHK ... than from any other mass media source." Japan has other television stations, but for most of the postwar period commercial broadcasters didn't do much news: they have traditionally been more entertainment-oriented than NHK, which specialized in documentaries, news commentary, breaking news, and news shows about government and politics. Krauss writes in his book "Broadcasting Politics in Japan" that NHK's government-centric news reporting has helped shape the government and politics of postwar Japan.
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When I visited TV Asahi news executives (in 1985) and they told me of their plans to begin a new type of news program, none of us would have imagined that it would change Japanese television news styles and potentially help alter its politics. |
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But the station's earlier dominance of the broadcast news market has waned. Commercial stations now do more news and NHK has lost its previously overwhelming market share."NHK news' relative decline in the 1990s and the rise of a new form of commercial broadcast news helps to explain why the state has recently been experiencing rising public cynicism, alienation and demands for reform," Krauss writes. In Chapter 8 of Broadcasting Politics in Japan, republished here with permission, Krauss explains how these changes in broadcast news in Japan have played out. Broadcasting Politics in Japan: NHK and Television News "Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality."
--Rupert Murdoch, address to the Edinburgh Television Festival "In public service broadcasting you get money to make programs, and in commercial broadcasting you make programs to get money."
--Bill Cotton, former Managing Director for BBC Television
By the early 1990s, NHK faced a challenge perhaps more serious than the failure of its "new media" strategy to ensure its technological and broadcast leadership at home and abroad: for the first time in 30 years, commercial competition struck at the heart of its long-term dominance of the news. Unlike some other public broadcasters in Europe that had once enjoyed a monopoly over broadcasting, NHK has always had commercial competition in the "marketplace" in the postwar period. Ever since the early 1960s when President Maeda Yoshinori had developed NHK's News Division into the premier broadcasting information service in Japan, the 7 p.m. news had been the flagship news program for all of Japanese broadcasting. In the late 1980s, TV Asahi, a commercial competitor, adopted an innovative news format for its new program, News Station, that NHK could neither emulate nor overcome. This new program has had a major impact on both television news and politics in Japan. Ironically, its format was in part pioneered by another of NHK?s news programs, News Center 9 p.m. (NC9), the first Japanese news program more in tune with the technology and methodology of television than the 7 p.m. news. NHK versus commercial television news: The reality of NHK dominance After the buildup of NHK's News Division in the late 1950s through the late 1960s, its dominance in this field became a fact of life for the commercial broadcasters. As early as 1962, even before this build-up was completed, NHK's news programs constituted 25 percent of its total broadcast time, with the commercial networks ranging from about 7.5 percent to 16.7 percent. Indeed, NHK's share of the 2000 minutes per week of news on the air in Japan has always exceeded 30 percent. After the 1960s, there were many reasons for private broadcasters' reluctance to devote more time and attention to the news. News was considered quite expensive to produce, especially for a broadcaster competing with NHK's huge personnel advantage in its national and international news gathering apparatus.
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NHK offered only predictable, old-fashioned, stuffy news about bureaucrats, government ceremonies, and policy changes, told in a bland, neutral, but somehow didactic manner. Its content and style lacked appeal for the younger generation. |
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NHK's News Division employed more than 1,000 reporters nationwide and about 800 people total in the News Center in Tokyo. By comparison, in 1985 TV Asahi, the Asahi News Network's (ANN) "key" station in Tokyo that was responsible for much of the national news for the network, had a total of 190 permanent employees and about 36 additional people who were contracted for services, with about 80 reporters covering the capital region.Given NHK's status in the media world, it also attracted some of the best graduates from the elite private and public universities. Confronted with this advantage in human resources, commercial broadcasters did not believe news could be very profitable before the late 1980s. An NHK top news executive confirmed that, because the costs of a news organization can be "bottomless," most broadcasters "didn't put a lot of effort into such programs." Financially, NHK had other major competitive advantages that constituted obstacles to commercial stations. NHK, for example, had more than three times the revenue of the average individual key commercial broadcasting station in Tokyo. Less obvious was the fact that NHK's salaries were lower, and the public broadcaster did not have to pay for its own capital construction costs. Further, unlike NHK, the commercial stations had to show a profit, and thus were much warier about sinking their resources into what might prove to be a risky venture given NHK's dominance in the field. Individual private broadcasters came to believe they could not compete with NHK's personnel, financial, organizational, and technical resources and advantages. A vicious circle was created: as long as NHK was dominant in news and commercial stations thought this field was unprofitable, they were unlikely to devote much effort or resources to trying to compete with NHK's advantages; as long as they did not even attempt to compete seriously, the commercial stations would continue to believe NHK's dominance in news to be impregnable and the field unprofitable. The commercial broadcasters also faced diminished incentives to becoming truly nationwide news-gathering broadcasters like NHK. For various historical and legal reasons, Japanese commercial broadcasters never developed the full, exclusive "affiliates" system found in the U.S. networks. They instead established news "networks," using their "key stations" in Tokyo to provide national news. Each of the major television news networks is partially owned by one of the large national newspapers. For example, the second largest newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, which some consider the "paper of record" in Japan and the most liberal of the national papers, is partial owner of TV Asahi. With this connection to the national press, "the television companies themselves put relatively few resources into building an organization to gather and present the news." When I interviewed TV Asahi executives in 1985, they quite adamantly insisted on their separate identity from the newspaper, asserting that "there are rarely any cases where a story covered by someone from Asahi (Shimbun) becomes news" and that the newspaper's information is used only as a basis for a story that then must be covered by the broadcaster's own reporters in order to get on the air. Nonetheless, they also said: "We have a hot line connecting the editorial department (henshu-kyoku) of Asahi Shimbun and our news desk. We also work closely with people at the local bureaus of the Asahi Shimbun across the country ... . We get information and Tokyo or a local bureau will cover a story based on this information." TV Asahi executives felt that it was a mutual relationship of "sharing information." In other words, commercial stations, to at least some extent, rely on external sources, such as the national newspaper that partially owns it, to alert it to the potential "pool" of news stories that day. This enables the commercial broadcaster to select among these stories to assign its cameras and reporters. Japan's commercial stations are not vertically integrated like NHK. More a news production than a news gathering service, they have little motivation to build up a more complete news organization. In the mid-1980s, the future looked worse than the past for Japanese commercial broadcasters. The "new media" revolution had begun and satellite broadcasting and later high-definition television were due to be introduced. The commercial broadcasters initially resisted satellite broadcasting, but NHK pushed for it with the support of MPT (Ministry of Post and Telecommunications) and would have an initial monopoly of direct satellite broadcasting before the commercial stations even had a single shared channel. NHK's present and future dominance in the news looked fairly invulnerable in 1985. Thus, when I visited TV Asahi news executives in the summer of that year and they told me of their plans to begin a new type of news program that autumn, none of us would have imagined that it would change Japanese television news styles and potentially help alter its politics.
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