This article criticizes Japanese television coverage of the coronavirus crisis, arguing that narration, ominous background music, and excessive theatrical production have degraded news reporting. What journalism requires is not emotion, but calm and factual reporting.

April 19, 2020
Seen from that horizon, one can also understand why the reporting, feature programs, and special programs of Japanese television stations are steeped in a masochistic view of history and anti-Japanese thought.
The following is from a serialized column by Nobuhiko Sakai, former professor at the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo, published in today’s Sankei Shimbun under the title, “Coronavirus Reporting: Television Must Eliminate Theatrical Production.”
The emphasis in the text is mine.
Television has exerted a great influence on reporting about the novel coronavirus problem.
This column is a column of newspaper criticism, but because the key stations of commercial television are closely connected with newspaper companies, I will take them up here.
An enormous amount of information concerning the coronavirus problem is being broadcast on television.
So-called celebrities also appear on wide shows and utter whatever impressions they like, but since even medical experts hold differing views, the presence of celebrities is not merely unnecessary, but harmful.
Needless to say, there are problems with wide shows, but I think there are also problems even in pure news programs.
For quite some time, I have been very concerned about the changes in news programs, especially those of commercial television.
That is because a tendency toward theatrical production has increasingly appeared in news reporting.
News in which a prepared script is read aloud to convey the facts is called “straight news,” and I remember that formerly all news was in this style.
At some point, however, excessive theatrical production came to be added.
Since it is television, there are also problems concerning images, but on this occasion, what I wish to focus on is not so much the visual part as the audio part.
“Narrators” other than announcers have come to be used frequently.
This is also true of NHK.
Moreover, perhaps in order to heighten the mood, the tone is extremely emotional and sentimental.
In other words, the expression has become exaggerated.
Another problem is background music.
In the case of dark news, eerie music that stirs up anxiety is used.
This is exactly the same as the way the video released by South Korea was made when, despite having directed fire-control radar at a Self-Defense Forces aircraft in a signal of attack, it piled lie upon lie.
This, too, is something I am the first in Japan to clarify, but in other words, it proves that Japanese television stations, beginning with NHK, are in fact controlled by Koreans residing in Japan or by people pretending to be Japanese.
Naturally, they are connected with South Korea and China.
Seen from that horizon, one can also understand why the reporting, feature programs, and special programs of Japanese television stations are steeped in a masochistic view of history and anti-Japanese thought.
The deterioration of television news reporting described above has appeared even more conspicuously in the reporting on the current coronavirus problem.
In the first place, the more serious the issue, the more calmly and plainly it must be reported.
When excessive theatrical production is added, it becomes dramatic, and on the contrary, reality is lost, and the sense of vigilance that should originally be maintained is also damaged.
Television studios were typical spaces of the “three Cs,” but around the end of March, people suddenly began sitting apart from one another.
In other words, this is proof that, before that, they had not been taking the matter seriously.
Now that the coronavirus problem is expected to be considerably prolonged from the outset, television media are required to adopt an even calmer reporting stance, free from theatrical production.