An essay reflecting on Japan’s television coverage on March 11, 2016, contrasting public broadcasting with commercial media to examine intentional opinion-shaping and the persistence of biased reporting.

2016-03-11

This morning, as I looked over the television listings in the newspaper, I felt both dismay and a firm sense of conviction.

It was about biased reporting—about the desire to shape public opinion in a direction of one’s own choosing.

On a day like today, March 11, no television station with a sound and ordinary sense of judgment would normally do such a thing. For example, NHK showed us something we had never known before: through computer graphics, it recreated the tsunami that surged into gymnasiums that had previously been criticized, thereby informing us for the first time.

By contrast, TV Asahi’s Hōdō Station was entirely different. Thyroid cancer. Chernobyl.

In other words, it was attempting to shape viewers’ public opinion toward opposition to nuclear power.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that until August two years ago, our country was completely dominated by the Asahi Shimbun.

Asahi Shimbun exerted influence over every conceivable social stratum.

Even today, the strength of its lingering influence was demonstrated by a single judge at the Otsu District Court the day before yesterday, and by the twenty-nine so-called “civic citizens” who filed the petition for a provisional injunction.

It would not be excessive to say that Asahi knew this outcome was coming. With its network of personal connections and information channels, it must have known things that most citizens did not. It must have known exactly who the judge in charge of the Otsu District Court case was and what kind of person he was—effortlessly.

It was then that I realized that today’s Hōdō Station lay precisely along that line.

What a vicious company it is.

Not only has it gravely damaged the honor and credibility of Japan and the Japanese people through repeated fabrications and pseudo-moralism, it has also— as I have noted many times— inflicted enormous losses on Japan amounting to as much as 1,400 trillion yen. And yet, far from being held accountable, it even succeeded in obtaining government approval for a floor-area ratio of 1,600 percent for its own building—something I, having made my living in real estate, had never once heard of.

Meanwhile, Kansai Electric Power Company, which has continued day and night to supply electricity of the highest quality in the world to Japan and its people, found itself in a situation where—at the hands of a single judge who was almost certainly raised on Asahi Shimbun—its corporate value fell by 14 percent in just five hours the very next day.

There is nothing more unreasonable or outrageous than this.