This chapter criticizes the reporting structure of Japan’s major media outlets, especially NHK, arguing that they lack both independent newsgathering power and a genuinely multifaceted perspective in reporting on both the United States and domestic politics.
Using Michio Ezaki’s commentary in Seiron as a point of departure, it argues that people should move beyond merely criticizing the mass media and instead support opinion journals that still provide valuable analysis.

2019-04-28
One can clearly see through them that the people who dominate the news division are sympathizers of Chongryon, China, and the Korean Peninsula, and that they are possessed of nothing but an ideology like a lump of masochistic historical consciousness, political correctness, and pseudo-moralism.

This was the chapter I published on 2018-08-14 under the title,
“A shift in thinking is required, from criticizing the mass media to supporting opinion journals of real value,”
but now I was surprised to realize that it is precisely the work I myself have been doing.
It is also an example of what I sometimes refer to when I say, “Things respond to one another.”
The following is.
From the “SEIRON Commentary” published in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Seiron by Ezaki Michio,
one of the genuine commentators,
a graduate of Kyushu University who has greatly contributed to increasing the esteem of that university,
and who continues to examine the truth of things.
The emphases within the text other than the headline, and the final …, are mine.

◎An Honest Confession by a Former NHK Reporter.

Japan’s media “asserted with certainty” that Hillary would win the U.S. presidential election, and they were spectacularly wrong.
In considering the reason for that, the “confession” of Yoichiro Tateiwa, who served as a desk editor in NHK’s international broadcasting bureau, is important.

“Japanese media outlets station bureaus and reporters almost only in the three major cities mentioned above: Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles.
Moreover, the work of reporters there centers less on meeting people than on checking the content of U.S. media reports and President Trump’s tweets.
In many cases, the people they interview are almost exclusively personnel at the Japanese embassy.
In other words, even in the United States, Japanese media speak only to people connected with the Japanese government, and then convey that to Japanese readers and viewers as though it were the actual image of America today.
That is the tendency.”
(Gendai Business Online, dated June 26)

The point is not bias alone.
The reporting structure itself is crude and inadequate from the outset.
There may be individually excellent journalists, but the American media themselves, which matter most, are so politically biased that President Trump denounced them as “Fake News,” and Japan’s mass media can do little more than translate that biased American reporting into Japanese.
If they truly intended to report from multiple angles, they should also introduce the arguments of think tanks and scholars who support Trump, but I do not believe the mass media possess either the discernment or the spare capacity, such as increasing staff, to do that.
That is where opinion journals like the monthly Seiron come in.
For example, the August issue of Seiron, in a feature titled “The Growing Reality of U.S. Troop Withdrawal from South Korea — Tsushima as the ‘38th Parallel,’” seeks to analyze the U.S.-North Korea summit carefully and clarify the issues Japan faces.
How can we increase the number of voters who understand the value of this kind of analysis, which the mass media cannot provide.
A shift in thinking is required, from criticizing the mass media to supporting opinion journals of real value.
To be continued.

As readers know, I sometimes refer to physiognomy.
Reading this chapter by Mr. Ezaki.
There cannot have been few readers who were reminded of Arima’s thin and shallow face, a face that seems to embody all the thinness of.
NHK Watch 9.
Its content as flimsy as a single sheet of paper, and the method it airs while calling it reporting.
Or.
The way Arima calmly lies, claiming that NHK obtained internal Ministry of Education documents through its own exhaustive reporting, when in fact they were merely materials brought in by Maekawa.
And to this.
Kuwako, truly dreadful, nodding along.
With a face as though to say, “I am a moralist, the embodiment of justice.”
Though in reality it is nothing more than an utterly childish, affected, coquettish face.
And believing that glaring into the camera amounts to criticizing the government.
While.
The Communist Party’s organ Akahata.
And the low-level Asahi Shimbun.
In NHK, which in substance is Japan’s state broadcaster.
Repeat criticisms of the government and of President Trump.
The whole spectacle is truly a dreadful tabloid show.
Because.
Not only them.
But also the people behind them who dominate NHK’s news division.
Are sympathizers of Chongryon, China, and the Korean Peninsula.
And one can clearly see through them that they possess nothing but an ideology like a lump of masochistic historical consciousness.
Political correctness.
And pseudo-moralism.
This chapter also clarifies one of the causes why it is such a dreadful program.