A critical comparison between NHK’s Watch 9 and TV Asahi’s Hōdō Station, revealing deliberate omissions and raising serious questions about political bias and compliance with broadcast law.

February 16, 2016

After watching NHK’s Watch 9, I switched channels to TV Asahi’s Hōdō Station.
Earlier, NHK had aired as one of its news items a truly laughable question posed by a female Democratic Party lawmaker to Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Sanae Takaichi—questions about the Broadcast Act and freedom of expression.

Hōdō Station did include Prime Minister Abe’s response, in which he stated that asking quiz-like questions in a budget committee session itself amounted to a waste of time.
That much was shown.

However, I continued watching in order to confirm what I was certain of—that TV Asahi would never broadcast the portion that NHK had aired.
And, as expected, my prediction was correct.

During the Democratic Party administration, a vice minister had stated far more explicitly and aggressively than the current Liberal Democratic Party responses that the Broadcast Act does apply and that biased reporting is not permissible.
Minister Takaichi read aloud that former Democratic Party vice minister’s Diet testimony.
That portion was not broadcast at all.

Instead, the program aired commentary by Nakajima and Kimura—individuals I have mentioned several times before—young men who merely parrot explanations in line with the intentions of the Asahi Shimbun.

I became convinced that this program, and indeed this television station, should be suspended under the Broadcast Act.

Anyone who, like myself, continued watching from NHK to this program must surely feel the same.

This program is truly appalling—far beyond tolerable.
Merely siding with a party such as the Democratic Party already warrants suspension of broadcasting privileges.

At a time when the world is in such a state, this is the party whose members lined up en masse at press conferences demanding the summoning of former Minister Amari, claiming they had obtained recordings secretly made by an accuser during a meeting with his secretary.

To think that such a despicable group exists in Japan, attacking Mr. Amari—a truly admirable statesman who overcame cancer and succeeded in concluding the extraordinarily difficult TPP negotiations—is astounding.

Because of people like these, we were forced to pay 30 trillion yen in tax money to China, created the long-term deflation that is now despised worldwide, suffered losses of 1,400 trillion yen, and produced today’s reality in which one out of every six children grows up in a household earning less than 1.8 million yen a year.

Nothing could be more absurd.