午夜剧场

This book had two aims in analyzing news from a political sociological perspective. The first was to demonstrate the significance of focusing on news when analyzing political society—in other words, to show how deeply news is involved in the state of society and democracy today. News is information related to the interests of many people in society, and it has long been argued that analyzing it leads to an understanding of the structure and dynamics of social values. While developing this perspective, this book emphasizes that the practices of news production and consumption embedded in daily life are integrated into the dynamics of the formation, maintenance, and transformation of political and social order.

The second aim is the analysis of the contemporary crisis surrounding news. Today, a "crisis" surrounding news has emerged, characterized by distrust and criticism of traditional news media on one hand, and the spread of fake news on the internet on the other. It is well known that this crisis of news has been linked to crises of democracy, such as the Trump phenomenon and post-truth. However, there are several other aspects to the crisis of news. First, amidst the flood of information caused by digitalization, it has become difficult to maintain a social consensus on "what news is." Second, closely related to this, as information for people to access "reality" has become excessively diversified and fragmented, the mechanism of sharing social reality through news is malfunctioning. These two aspects are also linked to the crisis of the existing order that has sustained democracy.

When I first began planning this book, I intended to focus primarily on the first point. However, as the media environment and political situation changed rapidly and interrelatedly over the past few years, the diagnostic analysis of the crisis in the second point gradually developed into a central theme of this book.

This book is the result of my research from the time I was appointed as a full-time faculty member in journalism theory at the 午夜剧场 Institute for Journalism, Media & Communication Studies until my transfer to the Faculty of Law. I would like to express my gratitude once again to the Institute for providing me with various research opportunities.

Shuzo Yamakoshi

Keiso Shobo

262 pages, 2,970 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of publication.