Journalistic autonomy and frame sponsoring. Explaining Japan’s “nuclear blind spot” with field theory

Abstract

Studies of Japanese media have noted a “nuclear blind spot” in the Japanese press before the Fukushima accident 2011. In contrast to other countries the civil use of nuclear power was only rarely criticized. This blind spot has been explained either with cultural factors like ideas of the relation between the environment and humans or with political control of media through press clubs. In the paper a frame analysis of three Japanese newspapers’ nuclear power reporting is combined with a field-theoretical approach. To map the journalistic field descriptions of journalistic professional ideals and measures of journalistic autonomy on the individual and company level are analysed together. In the commercial newspapers, more journalists see themselves as “educators” of the public. In newspapers with more field-specific symbolic capital, more journalists tend towards a critical ideal. It is shown how critical journalists were subject to organized pressure from the nuclear industry before 2011 and it is argued that this is a key factor in explaining the “nuclear blind spot”. To make visible such restrictions of autonomy is a potential strength of an orthodox Bourdieusian version of field theory based on the concepts of symbolic capital and autonomy. The combined analysis of capital and self-perceptions could be a way to bridge the explanatory gap between journalistic self-perceptions (role models) and journalistic practice.