Published: January 8th, 2012 at 6:15 am ET
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Fukushima lays bare Japanese media’s ties to top, Japan Times by David McNeil, Jan. 8, 2012:
[...] the Asahi Shimbun newspaper’s well-respected weekly magazine AERA [...] now-famous March 19, 2011, cover story showing a masked nuclear worker and the headline “Radiation is coming to Tokyo” was controversial enough to force an apology and the resignation of at least one columnist (though the headline was in fact correct). [...]
Before the Fukushima crisis began, Tepco’s advertising largesse may have helped silence even the most liberal of potential critics. According to Shukan Gendai, the utility spent roughly $26 million on advertising with the Asahi Shimbun. Tepco’s quarterly magazine, Sola, was edited by former Asahi writers. [...]
Published: January 8th, 2012 at 6:15 am ET
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“The mainstream media has long been part of the press-club system, which funnels information from official Japan to the public. Critics say the system locks the country’s most influential journalists into a symbiotic relationship with their sources, and discourages them from investigation or independent lines of analysis”
“Before the Fukushima crisis began, Tepco’s advertising largesse may have helped silence even the most liberal of potential critics. According to Shukan Gendai, the utility spent roughly $26 million on advertising with the Asahi Shimbun. Tepco’s quarterly magazine, Sola, was edited by former Asahi writers.
The financial clout of the power-supply industry, combined with the press-club system, surely helped discourage investigative reporting and keep concerns about nuclear power and critics of plants such as the aging Fukushima complex and Chubu Electric Power Co.’s Hamaoka facility in Omaezaki, Shizuoka Prefecture, which sits astride numerous faults, well below the media radar.
Throughout the Fukushima crisis, the mainstream media has relied heavily on pronuclear scientists’ and Tepco’s analyses of what was occurring. After the first hydrogen blast of March 12, the government’s top spokesman, Yukio Edano, told a press conference: “Even though the reactor No. 1 building is damaged, the containment vessel is undamaged. … On the contrary, the outside monitors show that the (radiation) dose rate is declining, so the cooling of the reactor is proceeding.”
Any suggestion that the accident would reach Chernobyl level was, he said, “out of the question.”"
that made my morning admin.. thank you!
and thank you japan times!
really fair and balanced reporting!! blimey!
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japan times is the guardian newspaper on super steroids!!
banzai!!
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from the article… one of the reports teddy jimbo did!!
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The fourth estate requires the same separation from government and business as does church from state or the public’s right to know will be sold down the river every time.
Corporations are NOT people. There are no grave yards for corporations.
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