This article examines Japanese press coverage of Premier Koizumi’s controversial visits to Yasukuni Shrine from 2001 to 2006. The shrine memorializes war dead, including 14 Class-A Second World War criminals, and is implicated in the history issue — the unresolved legacy of Imperial Japan’s wartime history. Using critical, qualitative content analysis, the authors analyze the Japanese press coverage’s representation of historical context. Theories of the social production of news and collective memory ground their analysis and interpretation of the representations and their implications. They argue that the press coverage that contextualized the shrine’s war criminals offered critical, mnemonic representations, while those that excluded this context provided fragmented representations. The authors assess the implications of these representations for the contemporary political objective of moving Japan toward a martial state. Ultimately, the Japanese press’s capacity to facilitate debate on history issues depends upon the public coming to terms with the war’s history and legacy.
Many journalists and scholars overlook the discursive role of music in TV political advertisements. But we argue that music is a potent means of political persuasion. Music in advertisements is determinative; all other elements—images, voiceovers, sound effects, written text, and so on—are circumscribed by the music and interpreted in relation to it. Music determines an advertisement’s character through framing and underscoring; musical frames establish interpretative categories and generate expectations, while underscoring comprises music that closely coordinates with images and voiceovers to form a persuasive aesthetic and rhetorical unity. A close reading of a 2004 Bush-Cheney advertisement applies this theory of frames and underscoring to explain the advertisement’s effectiveness. Without music, the advertisement would not only fail to persuade, it would also make no sense.
While much historiography on U.S. radio and popular music of the postwar period portrays disk jockeys as having a large degree of freedom, this article challenges this rendition and argues that their autonomy was constrained by a number of institutional and industry pressures. Based on discourses in industry and lay publications, the author argues that disk jockeys were pressured by recording industry largess and station management, which constrained their autonomy and public representations and contradicted the democratic ideology articulated by the U.S. broadcasting industry. Rather than neutral arbiters of public tastes, disk jockeys were complicit in a concerted effort to endow undifferentiated commodities with symbolic capital.
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