Book launchThursday 5 March 2020
6:00pm – 7:00pm
Press Freedom in Contemporary Asia
Drinks reception: 7:30pm – 8:00pm
13/14 Cornwall Terrace, Outer Circle (entrance facing Regent's Park), London NW1 4QP
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
Globalisation, in the form of new communication technologies, is posing common challenges to media freedom worldwide. In contemporary Asia, where authoritarian propaganda, censorship, physical violence and cyber-intimidation abound, courage is needed to work as a journalist. Even in the region’s democracies, political polarisation, disinformation, and business concentration are eroding media pluralism and freedom of the press.
In this book talk, Tina Burrett discussed the common constraints faced by journalists working in Asia’s newsrooms, arguing that harassment by state actors and their proxies, declining revenue, journalistic ethics, and social media present the most pressing challenges. Jeff Kingston evaluated the current state of media freedom in Japan, drawing attention to growing government pressure and self-censorship since Prime Minister Abe Shinzo took office again in December 2012.
Press Freedom in Contemporary Asia is edited by Dr Tina Burrett and Professor Jeff Kingston, and is published by Routledge. It is available to purchase via this link.
A video of the event can be found here:
About the contributors
Dr Tina Burrett
Dr Tina Burrett is Associate Professor of Political Science at Sophia University, Japan. She publishes on politics and media freedom, especially in Russia and Japan. Her recent publications on Russia include “Evaluating Putin’s Propaganda Performance 2000–2018” Sage Propaganda Handbook (2020) and “Russian State Television Coverage of the 2016 US Presidential Election”, Demokratizatsiya (2018). She is also author of Television and Presidential Power in Putin’s Russia (Routledge 2013) and editor of Press Freedom in Contemporary Asia (Routledge 2019, with Jeff Kingston). She has worked in the UK, Japanese, Canadian and European Parliaments and received a PhD in Political Science from Cambridge University in 2007. In addition, she was a Daiwa Scholar from 2006-2008.
Professor Jeff Kingston
Professor Jeff Kingston is the Director of Asian Studies and Professor of History at Temple University, Japan Campus. He has published widely on Japan and Asia, most recently publishing monographs on Japan (Polity 2019) and The Politics of Religion, Nationalism and Identity in Asia (Rowman Littlefield 2019). He has also edited two books on the media: Press Freedom in Contemporary Japan (Routledge 2017) and Press Freedom in Contemporary Asia with Tina Burrett (Routledge 2019), and co-edited a book on Japan’s Foreign Relations in Asia (Routledge 2018). He was a Fulbright Fellow 1984-85 and received his PhD in history from Columbia University in 1987.