Paper long abstract:

The rapid progress of stem cell research (SCR) have not only brought a lot of bio-medical knowledge but also variety of debates on the ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI). In the course of debates on ELSI regarding SCR, mass-media influenced frames of discussions and the public attentions. Also in Japan, there are huge amount of news on SCR particularly after human ES cell. This situation was accelerated by the appearance of human iPS cell. However, there regarding Japan, the changes of media attentions and their discourses concerning SCR has not been examined. In this study, we will give a discussion about empirical analysis of media attentions regarding SCR and its theoretical functions such as agenda building/setting or attention cycle.

We collected over 7000 news articles from three major newspaper sources and conducted quantitative analysis: co-word network analysis and content analysis. As the result of our media analysis, we gained some insights. One of the most significant findings is about a change in co-word network structures and contents such as "ethics" in discourses found in Japanese media over the after the establishment of human induced pluripotent stem cells in 2007. The number of connections of the keywords related to ethical aspects decreased rapidly. This result implied a change in position and treatment of ethical aspects for stem cell research, and suggested the peripheralization of ELSI in the Japanese media.