Political News Coverage During the 1986 Japanese Election Campaign

Abstract

This paper attempts to describe and to explain political news coverage during the 1986 Japanese election campaign in six major newspapers; it aims also to provide an examination of the editorial content pattern of the Japanese papers in an election time. The findings show that political news coverage was dominated by "Horserace" related items rather than "Issues" or "Campaign Events" stories, and that most of the papers tended to over-represent the dominant Liberal Democratic Party (L.P.D.) and to under-represent the opposition parties; the L.D.P. related news items were generally larger and included more pictures, which were also larger.