Barbara Gatzen is a visiting research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Trier in Germany. She is the author of Japanese television news: an intercultural comparison of presentation strategies in Japanese and German news shows (Gunter Narr Verlag, Tubingen, 2001). She is research editor for the Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies.

Recent articles

In Japan, the near-fifty year incumbency of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and the best efforts of Rupert Murdoch, have not yet managed to destroy the conception of ‘public service’ as a deliverer of honest and comprehensive news. But political pressure and media rivalries make the space for serious, critical, independent journalism a constrained one.