Environmental Pollution and the Media ─ Political Discourses of Risk and Responsibility in Australia, China and Japan

This book offers an empirical investigation of national media reporting of environmental issues in two distinctive Asian countries, Japan and China. The book acknowledges that news reporting in native languages mainly targets local and national audiences, helping to reveal the priorities and importance attached to environmental protection within the domestic agenda of each country, while the development and delivery of English-mediated materials chiefly targets an international audience interested in these two countries yet with limited knowledge of Japanese and/or Chinese.

The book analyses an important venue for officials in each country to demonstrate their attitudes and positions towards environmental issues in an international setting. English-mediated reporting, when studied and compared with native language reporting, will reveal similarities and divergences between the two neighbouring countries in terms of the delivery and consumption of news reporting of climate change and environmental concern. The book also highlights social and cultural factors to explain the differences. The book uses cross-national comparative analysis to uncover similarities and dissimilarities of the collection, packaging and delivery of environmental news such as major national disasters, environmental deterioration due to industrial expansion and/or natural disasters in the two countries.

This book makes an original and timely contribution to comparative environmental media research, by focusing on the conceptualization and delivery of climate change policies in Japan and China in the latest phase of globalization.

Meng Ji is Associate Professor of Translation and Cross-Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her research covers a range of fields from translation and cross-cultural studies (East Asia and Latin America), comparative media to corpus/computational linguistics, textual statistics and quantitative linguistics. Meng has published extensively on empirical translation studies which include a dozen internationally referred journal articles, two single-authored research monographs and two edited books.

Libby Lester is Professor of Journalism, Media and Communications at the University of Tasmania. Her books include Media and Environment: Conflict, Politics and the News (2010),Transnational Protests and the Media (co-edited with Simon Cottle 2011) andEnvironmental Conflict and the Media (co-edited with Brett Hutchins 2013). Recent articles have appeared inMedia, Culture & Society, International Journal of Communication, Journalism, Journalism Studies and Media International Australia. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and is an Associate Editor of the journalEnvironmental Communication. She worked as a newspaper journalist prior to joining the university.

Glenn D. Hook is Toshiba International Foundation Anniversary Research Professor and Director, Graduate School of East Asian Studies, The University of Sheffield, UK. From 2006 he has been the inaugural Director, National Institute of Japanese Studies, an international centre of excellence with the University of Leeds funded by the British authorities as part of the White Rose East Asia Centre. He has published numerous articles and chapters in Japanese as well as English on Japanese politics and international relations, especially in relation to security and governance in East Asia. His recent books includeJapan’s International Relations: Politics, Economics and Security (coauthor, Routledge, 2011, third edition);Decoding Boundaries in Japan: the Koizumi Administration and Beyond (editor, Routledge, 2010);Global Governance and Japan (coeditor, Routledge, 2007). He serves as a Director of the UK-Japan Twenty-first Century Group and has served as President of the British Association for Japanese Studies.

Luli van der Does-Ishikawa is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield from where she received her doctoral degree with a thesis on a qualitative and quantitative hybrid analyses of children’s songbooks of imperial Japan. Her research interests focus on analytical aspects of socio-cognitive representations of ideologies and their transfer through language.