Reconstruction of the boundary between climate science and politics: The IPCC in the Japanese mass media,1988–2007

Climate science in the media: A matter of national context

Media coverage of climate change has increasingly drawn scholarly attention. The relevant existing literature focuses on diverse issues from energy technologies (Stephens et al., 2009; Buhr and Hansson, 2011) to policy measures (Uusi-Rauva and Tienari, 2010) in different media outlets such as television and the Internet (Gavin and Marshall, 2011). However, a large part of such literature has focused on newspaper coverage of climate science because of the central importance of science in the climate change debate. This category of literature focuses on three main topics: 1) how climate science is represented in newspaper coverage, 2) why such representation occurs, and 3) what implications such representation carries on public deliberation.

Regarding the first topic, existing studies show that media representation of climate science differs widely from country to country and has changed over time. In the US media, scientific uncertainties and controversies among scientists have received central focus since the late 1980s (Trumbo, 1996; Zehr, 2000; Dispensa and Brulle, 2003; Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004; Antilla, 2005) while from 2004 onward, the media portrayal shifted its focus more on to the consensus view on anthropogenic climate change (Boykoff, 2007). In contrast to the US media, the European media have generally framed climate science as certain and highlighted climate risks, and the trend of coverage has been more or less consistent over time (Weingart et al., 2000; Brossard et al., 2004; Olausson, 2009). However, the British case exemplified a more complex picture of climate science coverage; the representation of scientific knowledge (and uncertainties) differed among newspapers (Carvalho, 2007).

The second topic is associated with the factors that shape climate science coverage. Some scholars emphasized the role of political ideology (Carvalho, 2007) and journalistic professional norms such as balance (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004) and sensationalism (Weingart et al., 2000). Others argued the influence of organizational factors such as media ownership (Dispensa and Brulle, 2003), news sources (Trumbo, 1996), and the use of wire news services (Antilla, 2005). From a broader perspective, cultural values (Wilkins, 1993) and political settings or circumstances (Boykoff, 2007; Olausson, 2009) might also be influential. What is important here is that those factors operated differently according to the national context. For example, what “newsworthy” means is largely different for the US and French media (Brossard et al., 2004). Thus, it is crucial to identify the national context of the media system in order to explain why media representation is constructed in a certain way.

The third topic deals with the implications of climate science coverage for public deliberation. Zehr (2000) revealed that media representation of scientific uncertainties did not diminish the authority of science; rather it was managed to augment scientific authority through boundary-work which rhetorically separated science and the public. Boundary-work is defined by Gieryn (1995) as an effort to distinguish science from non-science for the purpose of sustaining the authority and autonomy of science. ¹ Interestingly, Zehr argued the media’s boundary-work, in turn, constructed the “misinformed public” that might evoke public inaction. On the other hand, Weingart et al. (2000) and Peters and Heinrichs (2008) argued that the media’s construction of climate risks and ignorance of scientific uncertainties demanded political action and further contributed to the legitimization of climate policy. Importantly, the way science is represented or framed in the media might result in provoking different public/political responses.

In sum, media coverage of climate science is context-dependent, influenced by various—ideological, organizational and socio-political—factors, and may evoke different public/political responses. In this paper, we address primarily the first two topics discussed above in our Japanese case study and only briefly the third one. To do so, we first overview and clarify the role of the IPCC in the global climate arena.

The IPCC as a co-production of climate science and political order

The STS literature has a long history of critically analyzing the relationship between science and politics. Recently, the diverse strands of STS literature are increasingly converging into the concept of co-production. This concept’s proposition is basically, as Sheila Jasanoff proposed, that science and politics are inseparable (denying scientific determinism) and inter-constitutive; that is, “[s]cientific knowledge, in particular, is not a transcendent mirror of reality. It both embeds and is embedded in social [and political] practices … and institutions” (Jasanoff, 2004: 3). The establishment of the IPCC can be well understood in terms of the co-production idiom.

The IPCC was established in 1988 under the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in order to comprehensively assess the available expert knowledge on climate change. It has produced to date four assessment reports—in 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007—and comprises three working groups: Working Group (WG) 1 assesses the scientific basis of climate change, WG2 impacts and adaptation, and WG3 mitigation options. Its establishment should be understood as a result of a compromise among multiple competing interests (e.g. among developed and developing countries) regarding the appropriate relationship between science and politics (Agrawala, 1998a). The competing interests can be illustrated by the negotiating process to set up the IPCC as an intergovernmental body of scientific assessment; the IPCC was required to be politically sufficient to ensure governmental involvement and at the same time to be scientifically credible in its assessment (Agrawala, 1998a). In other words, it is one of the most important sites to co-produce climate science and political order.

The compromise among the competing interests resulted in establishing the IPCC as a boundary organization (Siebenhüner, 2003; Petersen, 2011), that is, an institutional device to stabilize the boundary between science and non-science (in this case, global politics), and with three features for pursuing that purpose: 1) the creation and use of standardized packages; 2) the participation of actors from both sides of the boundary as well as professionals who serve a mediating role; 3) its existence at the frontier of the two different social worlds of science and politics and its distinct lines of accountability to each (Guston, 2001). Petersen (2011) confirmed that the IPCC has those three features in the climate context. An example of the standardized package mentioned as the first feature is “climate sensitivity” which is defined as “the temperature change resulting from a doubling of the CO₂ concentration” (Petersen, 2011: 94). Climate sensitivity functions as a policy advisory parameter and facilitates communication between the scientists and policymakers. Without the IPCC, it would be very difficult to imagine that this concept would be continuously used in international climate debates. As for the second feature, the IPCC clearly has scientists and policymakers as participants through the extended peer-review process with the IPCC-nominated scientists serving a mediating role. The third feature can be directly observed in the word-by-word negotiations for the approval of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) (Petersen, 2011; see also Agrawala, 1998b). The SPM is meant to be the scientifically and politically authoritative representation of the IPCC assessment reports. The actual process exhibits that political demands are accommodated as long as the underlying assessment chapters are genuinely reflected upon in the SPM; therefore, the IPCC exists exactly at the frontier of science and politics and has distinct lines of accountability to both.

Another important feature of the IPCC is that its assessment reports are intended only to provide “policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive” advice for international negotiations (IPCC, 2010). Miller (2004: 61) argues that this is part of co-production processes which “consolidate [the IPCC’s] own technical authority by articulating a narrative of global politics in which experts play a powerful role as politically neutral agents.”

Thus, the IPCC can be said to be co-producing and co-produced in the science and political order of climate change. Previous studies of media coverage of climate science somehow ignored this co-production perspective and implicitly took a stance that media representation of the scientific knowledge should be scientifically accurate, which in turn argued that media misreporting led to public misunderstanding (e.g. Bell, 1994). In this paper, we instead focus on media representation of the relationship between science and politics pertaining to the IPCC.

First phase (1988–1990): The IPCC as an international political organization

Initially, the Japanese media largely represented the IPCC as an international political organization and focused on the political processes producing its First Assessment Report (FAR). For example, in reporting the IPCC’s first session in Geneva in November 1988, Asahi represented the IPCC as an international political forum by using the words “intergovernmental conference (seifukan kaigi)” ⁵ (Asahi, November 14, 1988, evening edition, p. 5) in the headline. The same type of framing was evident in this period, and thereby the image of the IPCC as a political organization was clearly constructed. Another form of such representation highlighted the national delegates participating in the IPCC sessions; Yomiuri and Mainichi described the IPCC as an organization in which “30 countries or agencies such as developing and communist countries, and international organizations participate[d]” (Yomiuri, February 11, 1989, p. 2) or one that “dr[e]w up urgent international reports on measures and strategies [of climate change] at the governmental level” (Mainichi, May 27, 1989, evening edition, p. 1). The framing as a political organization also took the form of emphasizing bargaining and confrontation among policymakers in the IPCC sessions. The fourth session of the IPCC, held in Sundsvall, Sweden in August 1990, was described as an international political arena where each nation engaged in political bargaining: in the news headlines, the words “conflict (tairitsu)” (Yomiuri, August 28, 1990, evening edition, p. 18; Mainichi, August 29, 1990, p. 3) and “clash and tangle (funkyu)” (Asahi, August 31, 1990, p. 30) were used to describe the debate during that IPCC session. The following article in Mainichi provides another example; it carefully represents the political arguments by national delegates in the IPCC sessions, but largely neglects the role of individual scientists and the scientific consensus on the adoption of the FAR:

[At the fourth session of the IPCC], the EC countries and Canada set a specific target [of measures curbing CO₂ emissions] as an agenda … but the US maintained the position that it was hard to take measures to restrict economic growth while scientific and economic research was inadequate. Also, oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia were unwilling to set a specific target. (Mainichi, August 31, 1990, p. 3)

Throughout the first phase the discourse of a political organization was highly visible; however, when IPCC WG1’s draft report of the FAR was disclosed to the public in April and May 1990, the alternative discourse, which framed the IPCC as a pure scientific organization with exclusive participation by scientists, began to emerge in the media. This discourse highlights the importance of the advisory role of science in climate policy and related scientific consensus, but it neglects the science–politics complex of the IPCC’s review processes. In line with this discursive construction, media coverage went even further portraying the IPCC as a warning scientists’ group, where the IPCC emerged in the media as an authoritative scientific organization that provides the undeniable scientific evidence of climate risks and urges political actions to reduce CO₂ emissions. ⁶ The very first article covering WG1’s draft report of the FAR in the three newspapers highlighted the future risk of projected sea level rise with the headline “The Entire Country Is Vanishing Away” (Asahi, April 14, 1990, p. 3). This article referred to the IPCC as an “international expert meeting (kokusaiteki na senmonka kaigi),” and described the IPCC’s projection as a certain scientific forecast of horrific consequences for the future climate. This was followed by other articles explicitly framing the IPCC’s projection including global mean temperature increase and sea level rise as the “warn[ing] (keikoku)” (Yomiuri, August 31, 1990, p. 1; Mainichi, May 26, 1990, p. 3) sign of anthropogenic climate change. Importantly, such media coverage never mentioned the inherent scientific uncertainties associated with the IPCC’s projection, but instead represented it as scientifically certain and highlighted the seriousness of climate change impacts. In other words, the IPCC’s scientific projection was transformed into an undeniable scientific “fact.”

Thus, the public disclosure of WG1’s draft report of the FAR triggered the media’s discursive construction of the IPCC as a pure scientific organization/warning scientists’ group and made headway for a further discursive shift of IPCC media coverage in the following period, that is, the proliferation of pure scientific organization/warning scientists’ group discourses.

Second phase (1991–1997):  The IPCC as an objective scientific authority

After publication of the FAR, the frequency of IPCC media coverage was very low during 1991–1996 (see Figure 1). In this second phase, the frame of political organization virtually disappeared, and that of pure scientific organization/warning scientists’ group increased. ⁷ The IPCC was increasingly represented as the scientifically authorized voice of climate change in two ways. The first one discursively constructed the IPCC’s projection as a “scientific backup” for new future projections and research findings of climate change ⁸ ; the second one contrasted the IPCC with climate skeptics, denouncing the latter as scientifically unreliable:

Compared with the scenario of global temperature increase projected by the IPCC, based on the views of more than 300 scientists around the world, we ought not to use unsubstantiated climate skepticism as an excuse for inaction, but rather take action together to curb CO₂ emissions. (Mainichi, March 28, 1995, p. 5: emphasis added)

From the example above, it is clear that the media authorization of the IPCC rested only on the grounds of the fact that a large number of scientists were participating in the IPCC’s assessment process, and therefore media coverage did not further scrutinize the IPCC’s scientific findings. Importantly, in such authorization, media coverage has never seriously focused upon the inherent scientific uncertainties in the IPCC’s projection.

Approaching COP3 held in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, media coverage of the IPCC increased markedly (see Figure 1). The media intensely covered the political processes regarding the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol at both international and domestic levels, ⁹ and repeatedly criticized policymakers as ignoring the IPCC’s scientific advice and their continuous attempt to protect vested economic interests. The Asahi article covering COP3 negotiations highlighted the confrontation among national delegates and criticized them as neglecting the IPCC’s scientific advice with the headline “Science Was Put On the Back Seat” (Asahi, December 7, 1997, p. 3). Likewise, a Mainichi editorial acerbically described the COP3 debate as a “bureaucratic calculus set up to allocate the reduction targets through political bargaining that is not based on science” (Mainichi, December 12, 1997, p. 5: emphasis added). Thus, media coverage engaged in boundary-work between science and politics by repeatedly constructing the image of the IPCC as an authorized global scientific voice warning against national delegates ignoring the scientific advice in the COP3 negotiations. ¹⁰ This boundary-work clearly demarcated science (the IPCC) from politics (COP3 debate), and by doing so it discursively enhanced the IPCC’s scientific authority and also evoked media cynicism toward political conflicts. Media cynicism toward climate policymaking, in turn, rhetorically constructed a political ideal of disinterestedness and cosmopolitanism, as could be identified by the metaphorical expressions of “earth’s benefit (chikyu eki)” and “global citizen[ship] (chikyu jin).” The editorials of Mainichi and Asahi clearly used these metaphors:

Rationally, scientifically, rejecting American egoism, firmly protect the earth’s benefit … (Mainichi, November 30, 1997, p. 5: emphasis added)

… if all don’t work together as global citizens, measures to prevent global warming will never yield results. (Asahi, November 30, 1997, p. 5: emphasis added)

The metaphors of “earth’s benefit” or “global citizenship,” on one hand, represent the media’s expectation that ideal cosmopolitanism and radical policymaking will lead to securing the international climate agreement, but on the other hand, rhetorically obscure the inherently complex and confrontational nature of climate policymaking. In particular, these metaphorical representations imply that both cosmopolitanism and radical policymaking are absolutely feasible, and the only requirement to do so is to embrace the IPCC’s scientific “warning” because the IPCC is the global and “value-free” authority of climate science representing “earth’s benefit.” Evidently, such media framing of the IPCC veiled the inherent co-production of science and politics stabilized by the IPCC as a boundary organization.

Third phase (1998–2007):  The IPCC as a warning scientists’ group

Following a short period of silence after the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, the frequency of IPCC media coverage soon rose again corresponding to heated political events such as the breakdown of the COP6 negotiation in The Hague in 2000, and the US withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. Consequently, the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (TAR) in 2001 drew relatively more attention from the media than the Second Assessment Report (SAR) in 1995 (see Figure 1). For example, Mainichi reported the release of the IPCC WG1’s TAR on its front page, ¹¹ and both Mainichi and Asahi devoted editorial comments to that report ¹² ; all these articles commonly described the IPCC report as a “scientific alarm” to make policymakers wake up and shy away from political struggle by informing them about the serious climate risks. Media coverage persistently framed the IPCC as a pure scientific organization or warning scientists’ group, with the same boundary-work as explained above. ¹³

The discursive construct of a warning scientists’ group can be identified in two ways. The first is the linguistic choice of words such as “warning (keikoku)” or “alarm (keishou)” associated with the IPCC. The second way is the sentence structure where the IPCC’s projection was described as providing scientific evidence for actual extreme weather events such as flooding and drought. For example, the front-page column of Asahi that mentioned heavy precipitation in Europe and extreme drought in Asia in the summer of 2002 noted that “[they] coincide with the warning that extreme weather will be caused by global warming” (Asahi, August 18, 2002, p. 1: emphasis added), and shortly thereafter mentioned the projection in the TAR as the evidence that climate change is causing such extreme weather events. Similarly, on the same topic, Yomiuri carried an analytical story associating these extreme weather events with the IPCC’s projection and concluded that “it is obviously urgent to take the impact of global warming seriously and take measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” (Yomiuri, August 21, 2002, p. 15).

Media coverage associating the IPCC’s projection with actual extreme weather events clearly increased in this period; in the first and second phases, the occurrence rate of such articles was 1% and 7%, respectively, whereas, in the third phase, the rate increased to 16%. Thus, in this phase, the warning scientists’ group discourse became more prominent than in the first and second phases. This discourse implies that the climate impacts the IPCC projected are already present and real. ¹⁴ Such discursive construction often took the form of vivid dramatization of climate impacts. For example, the high tide in Tuvalu became one of the most popular stories to highlight an impending climate crisis:

Viewing from the window of a propeller plane departing from Fiji, the South Pacific island of Tuvalu looked like a thin paper tape floating on water. During the New Year holidays, I visited this island that is said to have suffered the most serious damage caused by global warming … “In my childhood, it used to be a beautiful island with a white sand beach. But as the beach was eroded by waves one after the other and banks were built up, the landscape of the beach has been now completely changed. Relatives are thinking of migration, seeing our land going under the water. I am not sure how long I can live here,” a 42-year-old woman told me sadly … [T]he UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which consists of the world’s leading scientists, reported that “from the end of the 19th century to today, the sea level rose by 10 to 20 cm,” and further estimated that “the sea level will rise by a maximum of 88 cm within this century.” … On a faraway southern island, the crisis is looming in silence. (Mainichi, January 7, 2002, p. 27) ¹⁵

This article associates the IPCC’s projection of sea level rise with the vivid description of an unusual high tide and direct quotation of a local’s narrative. Interestingly, such coverage effectively reads as if the IPCC’s projection scientifically backed up the local’s anecdotal claim of climate impacts by placing the claim before the projection. A similar example is a Yomiuri article that covered the destruction of a coral reef in Okinawa, a southern island of Japan. ¹⁶ The article associated the IPCC’s projection of average ocean surface temperature increase and the extinction of the coral reef with the detailed observation of coral bleaching and a local fisherman’s voice in Okinawa. As is frequently observed in the media’s dramatization of climate impacts, scientific uncertainties in the IPCC’s projection were never highlighted.

In 2007, media coverage reached its highest point. It would be reasonable to say that this occurred because of the combination of critical political events such as the release of Al Gore’s influential film An Inconvenient Truth, the publication of the IPCC’s AR4, the G8 Summit in Heiligendamm, Germany (climate change was one of the main agenda), and the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to both the IPCC and Al Gore. In particular, the Nobel Prize award gave the media an opportunity to further authorize the IPCC as a warning scientists’ group. On October 13, 2007, all the three newspapers covered this story very intensively on the front page, together with editorial comments and in-depth analyses ¹⁷ : all their articles highlighted the role of the IPCC as a rational scientific adviser independent from disputatious politics and “warning” of climate risks, and also highlighted the higher ethical status of the IPCC and Gore, as opposed to policymakers’, reinforced by the Nobel Prize award. Moreover, the analogy of a “medical doctor” was used in order to enhance the IPCC’s authority. An example of this analogy can be found in Asahi’s editorial analyzing the implications of the IPCC WG2 report in AR4:

“You will get a fever and have a pain in your joints.” Our earth received such a diagnosis from the doctor. It is the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an association of world experts. (Asahi, April 7, 2007, p. 3: emphasis added) ¹⁸

In the end, the IPCC has been discursively constructed as a pure scientific authority regarding climate change that is separated from politics and that provides the “alarming” evidence of climate risks.

The IPCC in the Japanese mass media

Our discourse analysis revealed four features of media coverage of the IPCC in Japan. First, our analysis showed that the media discourses of the IPCC have gradually shifted from a political organization to a pure scientific organization and/or a warning scientists’ group (see Table 1).

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Table 1.

Identified media discourses of the IPCC.

	Phase 1 (1988–1990)	Phase 2 (1991–1997)	Phase 3 (1998–2007)
	(N = 249)	(N = 333)	(N = 624)
Political organization (%)	32	3	7
Pure scientific organization (%)	14	43	33
Warning scientists’ group (%)	7	19	37

N is the total number of the three newspapers’ articles in each phase.

This discursive shift may have been caused by the release of the FAR. Before there seemed to be some confusion and lack of information among policymakers and the Japanese media regarding what exact role the IPCC would play in the climate change arena. Indeed, the IPCC had only a loosely structured mechanism at the time of establishment; there was no formal international negotiation arena for climate change (Agrawala, 1998a). Combined with the fact that the IPCC was named as an “intergovernmental panel,” it can be assumed that the IPCC was represented as a panel for international negotiation during the first phase. The visibility of the IPCC report made it clear that the IPCC was going to conduct scientific assessments and triggered alternative media framings of the IPCC.

Second, the Japanese newspapers have largely ignored the scientific uncertainties inherent in the IPCC’s projection; 76% of the total number of analyzed articles in all phases did not mention any type of scientific uncertainties. This is clearly different from the US media coverage on climate change which has taken up scientific uncertainties and controversies as its main issue (e.g. Boykoff and Boykoff, 2004; Antilla, 2005); it is more similar to the European media such as those of Germany, France, and Sweden (Weingart et al., 2000; Brossard et al., 2004; Olausson, 2009, respectively), which highlighted the scientific certainty of climate science and the associated risks.

Third, our analysis showed that the Japanese media engaged in boundary-work which rhetorically separated science and politics. After the discursive shift triggered by the FAR publication, media coverage has repeatedly drawn a distinction between science and politics; on one hand, the IPCC was represented as the “objective” global scientific authority warning the policymakers, on the other hand, national delegates and governmental bureaucrats were portrayed as politically biased, dismissing the IPCC’s scientific advice to pursue vested interests. In other words, the IPCC was depoliticized as the pure scientific authority whereas the climate politics was further politicized as a mere political battle. As is consistent with Zehr (2000), this boundary-work discursively enhanced the IPCC’s scientific authority while constructing the disputatious image of climate politics, which may contribute to evoking cynicism toward the politics. Using the co-production idiom, the Japanese media co-produced the authority of climate science and cynicism toward climate politics.

Fourth, all three features explained above could be observed in the three newspapers, in a very similar manner. Given that each newspaper has a different political ideology, this homogeneity suggests that, regarding climate science reporting, such ideologies may not matter in the Japanese context. This contrasts significantly with the British newspapers, where their divergent ideologies mattered considerably in representing scientific uncertainties (Carvalho, 2007).

Japan’s context: Cultural, structural, and political economy approaches

How then can we explain the reasons for those features identified above? The three approaches—culturalist, structuralist, and political economy—proposed by Anderson (2009) are helpful to guide the search for such reasons. ¹⁹

The culturalist approach is concerned with how cultural norms and/or social values are embedded in media coverage (Hansen, 1991). That is, it assumes that media discourse inherently resonates with and thus embodies cultural “givens.” In our case study, such a cultural “given” would be the perception of science that is common in Japanese society. As noted by Fujigaki (2003), science in Japan is perceived as a “rational” and “infallible” intellectual activity to discover “value-free” facts. It can be argued that such a perception may contribute to the framing of the IPCC as a scientific organization separate from politics and also to ignoring scientific uncertainties in the IPCC’s projection because science is perceived as “infallible.”

In the structuralist approach, the roles of ideology and journalistic professional norms as well as media organizational routines come into central focus (Boykoff and Boykoff, 2007). A clear example is the study by Boykoff and Boykoff (2004), which argued that the balance norm of US journalism created the “false-balance” phenomenon to intensify climate skepticism in the US media coverage. In our case, it would be reasonable to argue that the sensationalism norm shared by the Japanese newspapers caused them to favor dramatized stories of climate change, such as the political confrontation in the COP debates and extreme weather events, over detailed scientific discussion. It was neither important nor newsworthy for them to report climate science in detail; instead, they sought confirmatory and credible scientific information to underpin the social/political drama of climate change. This tendency is reinforced by the objectivity norm, which is defined in the context of Japanese journalism as “providing confirmed factual accounts rather than balanced but interpretive accounts” (Krauss, 1996: 255). This norm, together with the traditional view of science discussed above, encouraged Japanese newspapers to regard the IPCC’s projection as “confirmed hard facts” and to eliminate the surrounding scientific uncertainties including those arguments by the climate skeptics.

The political economy approach emphasizes the influence of the media–source relationship on the pattern and structure of coverage (Sigal, 1986). In Japan, the media–source relationship has been rigidly institutionalized by the Kisha Clubs (reporters’ clubs) (Freeman, 2000; Krauss, 2000). The Kisha Clubs are the informal cartels of reporters affiliated with Japanese newspaper companies and are attached to all major ministries of the Japanese government, political parties, and business associations. Reporters from major Japanese newspapers are generally assigned to specific institutions or organizations and operate inside that organization’s Kisha Club. A large portion of news content published in the Japanese newspapers comes from reporters who belong to the Kisha Clubs, which often “tend to impart a distinctively official stance” (Budner and Krauss, 1995: 350). Thus, the Kisha Clubs function as the institutional channel of “pack journalism” consequently fostering homogeneity in coverage and exclusive dependence on “official facts,” while ignoring the “unofficial” voice of citizens or informal organizations (Krauss, 2000). ²⁰ In our case, it can be argued that newspaper coverage of the IPCC was homogenized through the Kisha Clubs; because Japan’s governmental contact points to the IPCC are ministries and an agency (Meteorological Agency for WG1, MOE for WG2, METI for WG3), reporters affiliated with different newspaper companies belong to the same Kisha Clubs of each ministry/agency and tend to report the same press conferences and press releases regarding the IPCC as “official” information. Furthermore, the Kisha Clubs might contribute to the elimination of climate skeptics in the Japanese newspaper coverage because they make the reporters prioritize the “official” information from the IPCC over that from generally “informal” or “unofficial” climate skeptics.

Media reconstruction of the science–politics boundary

As mentioned above, the Japanese newspapers engaged in boundary-work and discursively constructed the IPCC as a pure scientific authority which is strikingly different from the IPCC’s actual status in global climate politics. In the international climate arena, the IPCC, as repeatedly mentioned, is represented as a boundary organization that stabilizes the co-production of climate science and politics, and this is argued to be one of the main sources of the IPCC’s influence on international negotiations (e.g. Agrawala, 1998b; Miller, 2004). On the other hand, in the Japanese media reporting, the IPCC is discursively constructed as a pure scientific agency independent from politics, warning policymakers that it is a scientific imperative to fight against climate change with real political actions. Essentially, the Japanese media’s boundary-work veiled the inherent co-production of climate science and political order on the IPCC’s institutional setting. Taken together, the Japanese media reconstructed the IPCC’s hybrid boundary of climate science and politics recognized at the global scale into the classical demarcation of science from politics in the Japanese context.

Our analysis reveals that Japan’s national context matters in accounting for such a media reconstruction of the science–politics boundary. As Anderson (2009) noted, the accounts for contextual influence on media discourse can be broadly classified into three approaches: culturalist, structuralist, and political economy. In our case, they are respectively the perception of science in Japanese society, the journalistic professional norms such as sensationalism and objectivity, and the institutional media–source relationship through the Kisha Clubs. In this respect, the media’s reconstruction of the science–politics boundary can be argued to be a part of the media “domestication” processes where the “global” character of climate change is translated or domesticated by the media so as to adapt to the “national” context (Olausson, 2009; Eide and Ytterstad, 2011). Through this media domestication, the IPCC’s hybrid character of the science–politics complex is transformed into the iconic image of pure science that fits to the national media logic and cultural norms in Japanese society, where science is predominantly viewed as separable and independent from politics (Fujigaki, 2003).

This media domestication not only highlights the importance of national context in reporting science but also sheds light on the variation of the science–politics boundary in global and national contexts. It is evident that the boundary between science and politics is continuously constructed and reconstructed on the different social dimensions and that media reporting is one of the constitutive processes of co-production. Therefore, in order to fully account for the IPCC’s co-production of climate science and politics (and its political influence) at both the global and national levels, it is necessary to reveal how the media represent the IPCC and reconstruct the boundary between science and politics. Moreover, while it has been argued that public understanding of climate science differed by and large among nations (Brechin, 2010), we can argue that the media domestication may also contribute to such difference. Therefore, further research on how and why the media domesticate climate science among different national contexts will be a necessary endeavor to explore the complexity of public understanding of climate science.