Written on August 15, 2020, this essay criticizes NHK News Watch 9’s coverage of the proposed CDP–DPFP merger, focusing on its treatment of parliamentary numbers—89 versus 62—and polling figures of 4.5% versus 0.7%, and asks how the selection or omission of facts can shape political impressions.

2020-08-15
This essay was originally written in August 2020, when the proposed merger between the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and the Democratic Party for the People was being widely reported.
The issue I raised was not merely the wording used by a single television program.
It was the larger question of which facts a news organization chooses to report, which facts it chooses not to report, and how those choices may shape the political impressions received by viewers.
What I particularly questioned at the time was the treatment of two sets of figures: 89 members of the Constitutional Democratic Party and 62 members of the Democratic Party for the People, and polling figures of 4.5% and 0.7%.
The following is the essay I wrote on August 15, 2020.
There can be little doubt that one of the people exercising considerable influence over NHK’s news programming, particularly News Watch 9, is Kensuke Ogoshi.
As I have written before, Ogoshi and Azumi, a senior figure in the Constitutional Democratic Party, joined NHK at roughly the same time, while Arima joined three years later.
It would therefore be natural to assume that the three are close friends.
I have repeatedly written about how appalling Arima’s coverage of the Moritomo and Kake controversies on News Watch 9 was, although at the time I knew nothing about the relationships among these people.
Knowing about them makes the whole thing seem even more ridiculous.
Perhaps this column has managed to reach at least some people in society.
Compared with before, Arima’s excesses have become considerably less pronounced.
But old habits die hard.
If I were to list what I regard as the essential characteristics of NHK since the indoctrination of the GHQ era, they would include a self-denigrating view of Japanese history, pseudo-moralism, political correctness, pro-China and pro-Korea tendencies, impression-management reporting, and so on.
Thursday’s News Watch 9 was also terrible.
It concerned the proposed merger between the Constitutional Democratic Party and the Democratic Party for the People, something that, in my view, most citizens already understood was unlikely to amount to anything worthwhile.
News Watch 9 was clearly presenting coverage favorable to the Constitutional Democratic Party.
Watching it made me feel almost nauseated.
Here are the facts that News Watch 9 did not report.
The Constitutional Democratic Party had 89 members, while the Democratic Party for the People had 62.
The difference was not particularly large; in terms of parliamentary numbers, they were parties of roughly comparable size.
Nevertheless, News Watch 9 not only continued to report as though the Constitutional Democratic Party were vastly larger, but also failed properly to report even this simple fact.
Was it trying to influence viewers—or legislators who were considering remaining in the Democratic Party for the People?
It reported only that the Democratic Party for the People had a support rating of 0.7% in the opinion poll.
It did not report that the Constitutional Democratic Party’s support rating was only 4.5%.
Had both figures been reported, it would have become perfectly obvious, in my view, that two parties with very limited public support were moving together for electoral purposes—and, given Ichiro Ozawa’s involvement, I suspected that the true objective might be the substantial funds inherited by the Democratic Party for the People from the former Democratic Party of Japan.
For News Watch 9, which I believed had favored the Constitutional Democratic Party, that was perhaps precisely the impression it wanted to avoid.
But what News Watch 9 was doing, in my view, was impression-management reporting itself.
I had understood the Broadcasting Act to mean that journalists engaged in television news should not inject their personal opinions into reporting.
What I regarded as particularly objectionable about NHK was that it gave ordinary employees titles such as “anchor” or “caster,” thereby maintaining that they were not acting as reporters and could therefore express opinions.
Until recently, Takeda, who hosted Close-up Gendai, a program closely connected with News Watch 9, frequently invited Daisuke Tsuda and Koichi Nakano of Sophia University to appear as commentators.
I watched them and wondered who these men were, and what kind of person Takeda was to give such people such prominent roles.
Their method, in my view, was to give preferential exposure to people whose ideological and political positions coincided with their own.
That is what I regarded as biased reporting.
And the execution of it was repeatedly poor.
When it came to reporting on President Trump, I regarded them as clearly anti-Trump.
For example, the previous year Arima traveled to the United States, supposedly to report that sections of the electorate that had supported Trump were beginning to abandon him.
He spoke in a café-like setting with a single white man whose background was not made clear and had him criticize Trump.
That encounter was then presented as evidence that Trump supporters in the United States were beginning to defect.
The same kind of thing occurred routinely in Japan.
When they wanted to criticize the government, they would align themselves with anti-Abe stories promoted by the Asahi and attack the administration.
Their method was repeatedly to interview one housewife, one restaurant owner, or another individual, and then present that view as though it were the correct position and representative of the nation as a whole.
In my view, the level of such reporting was beneath even that of kindergarten children.
I believed it was no exaggeration to say that the method differed little from that used by the Chinese Communist Party.
And Wakuda’s expression had become so painful to watch that I could hardly bear to look at it.
If she shared the same ideology and political positions as the others—including what I regarded as the same self-denigrating view of Japanese history and anti-Japanese thinking—then that was the consequence of her own choices.
I feared that if things continued that way, her mental well-being itself could suffer.
If, however, she had nothing to do with their thinking and had simply accepted the role of the program’s public face without knowing the true nature of News Watch 9, then I could only feel sorry for her.