A Public Betrayed [antikvár]

Foreword This is a valuable book about a neglected topic. Japan is one of the most media-saturated democracies in the industrialized world. It has the highest newspaper circulation of all such major democracies. Any of its several biggest newspapers dwarf any Western country's newspapers. Its citizens watch more hours of television than any people except Americans. Surely, the relationship between media and politics in one of the world's most influential polities is a significant subject. For years few on this side of the Pacific paid much attention, either in the scholarly or journalistic worlds, to Japan's mass media. Then, with Japan's rise to world prominence through economic power beginning in the 1990s we began to see books and articles in English about the mass media's and politics' influence on each other. Yet surprisingly I know of no previous major study of the shukanshi, Japan's ubiquitous and seemingly omniscient popular weekly magazines. In Japan, one sees them everywhere—on sale prominently displayed in bookstores and at train-station kiosks, and their advertisements, as authors Adam Gamble and Takesato Watanabe point out, hang in almost every subway car, with Japan's train-commuting public coming into contact with their sensational headlines every day. And what headlines these are! Stories about crime and scandal, the foibles and personal and political lives of politicians, major issues of the day, important cases of history and national identity. You name it, if it's something that