Japanese TV Covers the Beijing Olympics : News Programs and the Changing Audience Attitudes towards China

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The purpose of this study is to explore the changes of Japanese attitudes towards China and the Chinese after being exposed to information connected to the Beijing Olympics and its news reports through mass media. We put focus on "decoding" the Beijing Olympics. And this study used an online survey to collect data.Japanese people were very much interested in the Beijing Olympics. They spent much time watching news about the Olympics and Olympics-related matters. Japanese broadcasting spent more time on Chinese news during and before the Olympics than usual, according to our survey. International sports events always attract peoples' attention, influencing their respective audiences' attitudes in various ways.We know that the influence of media over people cannot be measured easily. Nevertheless, as far as our research is concerned, Olympics coverage and related news on China, generally speaking, had an overall positive influence on understanding/appreciation of present day China and Chinese as reported by our respondents. The media event of the Beijing Olympics presented Japanese with a valuable opportunity to modify long-held stereotypical preconceptions about China, more positive changes were found in two aspects of our surveys, namely, people's attributes and ideological orientation. The self-categorized "television watchers" in our survey reported having a better image on China in terms of ideological orientation, with the "National character"-oriented sub-group of the "television watchers" reporting image/attitude shifting in a more positive direction. Encouraging signs were also observed among members of the "Economy & society" and "Power of the state" groups. Even the "History & culture"-oriented group, which already reported good pre-testing evaluations of China/Chinese, displayed an observable positive shift in the test condition survey.