3 April 2005
Japanese News: The least independent and trustworthy media in the democratic world?
- By Adam Gamble and Takesato Watanabe www.mediachannel.org
Kyoto -- As Dan Rather signed off from The CBS Evening News, and a slew of media scandals continued to reverberate all across America -- ranging from the US Education Department paying journalists to promote its policies to propagandistic "video news releases" produced by other government agencies being used as fake news on television stations -- the latest Gallup Poll showed that only 20 percent of Americans still trust their news media.
It could be worse, said NBC News president Neal Shapiro: "We're still higher than congressmen and car salesman."
Shapiro is correct. But if you think that the U.S. media's problems are bad, at least they have not yet sunk to the level of America's closest trading partner, Japan, whose media is cringingly compliant to government interests.
Many decades ago, Japan pioneered the consolidated ownership structure and cozy government relationships that currently threaten US media credibility. During the 1930s, more than 3,000 independent outlets were put out of business until just six staunchly pro-war corporations dominated Japan's news media.
Sound familiar?
The resulting structure of Japan's media remains largely the same today -- untouched by any post-World War II war reforms. The worst holdover from before the war is Japan's system of so-called press clubs -- roughly 1,300 press pools housed inside the very government and corporate entities they cover. Press-club reporters work closely with PR officers and tend to regurgitate the information fed them, often without cross-checking. They receive exclusive access to sources, and hundreds of millions of dollars in perks and subsidies. In exchange, they police themselves. Any journalist caught straying from the approved line is punished by colleagues -- even blackballed.
Non-club outlets are relegated to outsider status -- even the influential, large-circulation weekly newsmagazines, shukanshi. But they are no real alternative to the insiders, since their own journalistic standards tend to fall somewhere between that of The National Inquirer and Hustler. Of the 20,000 working Japanese reporters -- club members and non-members alike -- perhaps as few as 1% have any university training in their profession, and only a handful have anything like a US journalism degree. The rest receive about two weeks of corporate "training" before being turned loose.
The result is the least independent, and arguably the least trustworthy, news media in the democratic world, whose transgressions could shock the most jaundiced American audience.
Consider the quasi-public television network and world's largest broadcaster NHK, recently caught censoring a 2001 show holding Tokyo responsible for "comfort women" forced into sex slavery during WWII. Two days before air, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politicians close to Prime Minister Koizumi expressed displeasure. NHK scrambled to cut footage of rape survivors, splicing in a preposterous academic calling the victims willing prostitutes.
Media denials of Japan's WWII atrocities -- the "comfort women," the Nanjing Massacre, sometimes Holocaust denial itself -- are politically useful because key LDP founders were in the imperial government and the party inherited the Imperial Household Agency's political mantle. Whitewashing the War legacy is therefore necessary to bolster the LDP's legitimacy. Japan's media also helps advance the current government agenda, which includes getting a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and projecting military power again "like a normal country," free from constraints of its pacifist postwar constitution.
Public opposition to Japan's deployment of some 1,000 troops to Iraq is a liability for this agenda, so the media dutifully repeats government assertions that these "Self-Defense Forces" are constitutionally deployed in a "non-combat zone." But when the violence escalated last year and belied this, mainstream Japanese outlets withdrew their reporters and now simply take their news from official military sources.
Similarly, when Japanese civilians were taken hostage in Iraq last year, public sympathy for them might have embarrassed the government. So the media was enlisted to spout the official line: that the hostages were unpatriotic troublemakers for remaining in Iraq against government advice.
In short, Japan's Fourth Estate has a giant pro-status-quo sign on the lawn. Not only is its lack of independence dangerous for Japan's one-party democracy, but the impunity with which the government manipulates it undermines democracy around the world. Indeed, judging from rising scandals and falling trust, the US and other Western media seem to be drifting more in Japan's direction than the other way around.
The European Union repeatedly protests Japan's press club system, while the Bush administration ignores it, and instead praises Japan as the great success story of democratic nation building. But Japanese media malfeasance will only continue and metastasize globally unless the US makes it clear that its commitment to promote democracy and press freedom applies not just in Lebanon, Iraq and Russia, but everywhere, including Japan, and even at home.
-- Adam Gamble and Takesato Watanabe are coauthors of the book "A Public Betrayed: An Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and their Warnings to the West." Watanabe is a professor of Media Ethics at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. Gamble is a Massachusetts-based writer and researcher.