A Study Of Japanese Media’s Moral Foundation Of Reporting On China

How Japanese media construct the image of China,comment on China-related hot issues and news agenda,and transmit values and ideologies to Japanese audiences is exactly what we need to pay constant attention to and study.The moral foundation affects political views,party positions,ideologies and values,and is the reason and starting point behind behaviors,as well as the manipulative "motivation" behind the text content writing and structure of news reports.This paper selects all China-related reports of The Japan News from 2016 to2020,the English edition of Yomiuri Shimbun,one of the three major Japanese media,as the research object,and applies the moral foundation theory and the moral foundation dictionary to start from the macro overall、theme and micro issues of the Chinese-related reports of Japanese media.This paper explores and analyzes the moral foundation,the attitude tendency of moral foundation and the reasons behind the image construction of China and comments on China-related events in political,military,economic,social and cultural aspects.The study found that among the five groups of moral bases,"care/harm" was the most frequently used in Yomiuri’s China-related reports,while the other four groups of moral bases were "authority/subversion","fairness/cheating","loyalty/betrayal" and "sanctity/degradation" in descending order.In all the five groups,the negative moral foundation was used more than the positive moral foundation,and the negative moral foundation of "harm","deception" and "subversion" was emphasized and concerned.From the moral foundation using of different subject,the "care/harm" and "authority/subversion" are the moral foundation which used most in political and military theme reports,marking report using the most economic subject moral foundation is "fair/cheating",social and cultural theme marking report using the most moral foundation is "care/harm".Thus,this study explores the reasons about moral foundation situation,the moral foundation application of Yomiuri Shimbun China-related report and the motivation behind it and basis of social morality in Japan’s history,heritage is inseparable,such as the result of the geographical and historical reasons of crisis consciousness,national common belief of "samurai spirit" and so on.In addition,the theories were used in the current domestic research for the Japanese media China-related reports is relatively single,and the related research has not go deep into the moral foundation this dimension analysis,this study aims to from emerging theory visual angle,for the cognition and moral values of the existing problems in its China-related report reflects,put forward the corresponding suggestions and solutions.