ABSTRACT
In a democratic society, it is important for people to know diverse values, and it has been thought that the mass media provides an opportunity to access diverse information and opinions. However, newspapers facing the crisis of reader decline are concerned about losing such forum function. In this study, the diversity of newspaper coverage of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident and Brexit was analysed as a comparison between Japan and the United Kingdom. The newspaper articles were classified into several topics using machine learning techniques, and the biodiversity indices were calculated to assess internal diversity (diversity within a medium) and external diversity (difference between newspapers). As a result of analysis, the following two points were found. First, each newspaper in Japan and the United Kingdom addressed their issues from various aspects such as economics and security. Second, the differences between newspapers were small in each country. From this result, it is considered that the newspapers still provide readers with an opportunity to access various information and have a forum function. In the future, it will be an issue to analyse the diversity of newspapers in terms of tones and stances.
