2010-10-11
I also subscribe regularly to the weekly magazine AERA as a matter of habit, but I believe there is no magazine whose logic is as unclear as this one…
The reporter named Asako Mitsuhashi, who wrote this week’s lead story, was, until very recently…“Reporters receive controlled information from designated senior officials and write their articles from it…I have seen various press clubs, but none was as pathetic as the club covering the prosecutors. Ever since, I have never trusted articles written by reporters covering the prosecutors.” (Yoshitsugu Tanaka)…precisely the kind of reporter who had continued writing articles that could not be trusted.
This was true even while Shukan Asahi was continuing to pursue the matter…She was a reporter who had been writing up “controlled information” to an astonishing degree…Since the reality of the prosecutors’ conduct came to light, she has, admittedly, made it appear that she has changed her tone just a little, but nothing about her essential nature has changed.
I believe it is fair to judge her to be a hypocrite exactly like Asahi’s current editorial writers…And not only that: surely you, too, can clearly see that people whose minds work this way…to put it simply, people who are hopelessly stupid…are the greatest culprits.
What she conveys to the public through her incoherent account is a repeated exercise in implanting the idea that “Ozawa must be a villain”…
Truly, what an incorrigible person…
Does she feel some internal rivalry toward Shukan Asahi, or perhaps regard it as belonging to a different faction…?
Does she make a point of never reading it?
Even now, after numerous incisive journalists in Shukan Asahi have, for the first time in the postwar era, exposed the reality of press clubs…particularly those attached to the public prosecutors’ offices…and made the nature of their information clear for all the world to see, she continues to pour out government-supplied information uncritically.
She runs a subheading such as “Slush Funds Are the Hurdle,” pours out a parade of information from senior prosecutors, and finally goes so far as to run a subheading such as…“No ‘Tamari’ Found.”
Does she think anyone other than those connected with the prosecutors would accept a term like “tamari” as natural language?
Those with time to spare, please read the lead article she has written in this week’s issue.
Even at this stage, she spends four pages implanting the idea that Ichiro Ozawa must be a villain…with a parade of information from the prosecutors.
However much freedom of expression there may be, should it be acceptable for her to keep writing articles like this?
Ms. Mitsuhashi, even if Ichiro Ozawa were an ordinary citizen rather than a politician, would you write this kind of article that uncritically relays the prosecutors’ claims and turn him into a villain?
And why is it that these people, and the political hacks engaging in this foolishness alongside them, bring up old-fashioned terms at every opportunity?
To the right of the relentlessly emphatic headline “Ozawa Can Be Arrested,” there is a small, incomprehensible phrase, “Prosecution Review Commission Fascism Has Begun”…and the opening reads…“Overriding legal professionals, citizens drag a powerful figure of the day into court.
Some may applaud the greatest ‘overthrow of superiors by inferiors’ in Japanese history.
But it is not that simple.”
What a title—the very pinnacle of incoherence! (Laughs.)
What they have in common is…“the overthrow of superiors by inferiors”…their readiness to invoke such language without a second thought.
One could say that this phrase alone reveals that their thinking is at the level of university students.
It is truly unpleasant to realize that commentary of this kind has created our country’s lost twenty years…
All I could do was send her the previously mentioned “The Media’s Accountability” through AERA’s website.
She apparently really believes there are citizens who regard this affair as the greatest “overthrow of superiors by inferiors” in Japanese history.
Asahi, will you not reflect on what you are doing, rather than further tearing to shreds the forty years during which I trusted you? Please stop uncritically pouring out government-supplied information.
If you are going to go that far, could you have Ms. Mitsuhashi show proof that she has completed legal apprenticeship training before doing so? Otherwise, it is, in substance, a crime…
For I believe that, were it not for Shukan Asahi, you would not escape being condemned by posterity as a great criminal, alongside the other newspapers and television stations.