During the Diet hearings on the Kake Gakuen issue, decisive testimony by former Ehime Governor Moriyuki Kato and others was largely ignored by major newspapers and television programs. This essay exposes how Japanese media abandoned fact-based reporting and transformed themselves into instruments of political activism.

2017-08-01
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Media turned into political activism.
Suenobu.
In my own words, it comes down to this.
Politics overdid its media strategy and ended up turning itself into media.
Meanwhile, the media, putting “opinion first,” transformed itself into political power.
Originally, politics should advocate policies, and the media should report on them fairly and objectively from a detached perspective, yet it has all become a political movement.
Wide shows in particular, obsessed with ratings, simply chase topics that match the fleeting mood of public opinion in order to produce programs that attract viewers.
They jump on stories that make people feel, “The Prime Minister is favoring his friends and doing something shady,” but they neither investigate nor report what actually happened.
Kato.
On July 10, a closed-session Diet hearing was held, and former Vice Minister of Education Kihei Maekawa was called as a witness.
In addition, Eiji Hara, a member of the National Strategic Special Zone advisory working group, and former Ehime Governor Moriyuki Kato attended. Listening to Mr. Hara and former Governor Kato, I thought, “So that’s how it really was.”
In short, long before the special zone issue arose — as far back as fifteen years earlier — it was Kake Gakuen that had been saying it wanted to establish a new veterinary school.
Members of the special zone committee did not even know about any relationship between the Prime Minister and the chairman of Kake Gakuen.
Suenobu.
However, Asahi Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun barely wrote about former Governor Kato’s testimony.
Wide shows did not use the remarks of Mr. Kato or Mr. Hara at all, relying almost exclusively on Maekawa’s statements.
Maekawa was edited and presented as if he were a “pitiful victim whose private life was exposed by political power colluding with Yomiuri, yet who still stands as a heroic champion of justice,” leaving that impression on viewers.
Kato.
They approve subsidies for private schools and then parachute into those institutions after retirement. That is corruption.
The Ministry of Education is originally a third-rate bureaucracy, yet it wields enormous power over educational administration.
If you say “third-rate bureaucracy” on television, it immediately gets bleeped out.
Suenobu.
Your tongue is as sharp as ever (laughs).
I appear on TV Asahi’s program “Wide! Scramble” on Thursdays and Fridays, but even on that show, when the host cut off my and a guest’s questions to a former Ministry of Education official, I took a break from the program in protest.
Kato.
You mean the Ministry of Education OB Terawaki Ken, the architect of “yutori education,” right.
I don’t understand why he appears to defend Maekawa.
He is the very person who destroyed Japan’s education.
Suenobu.
He looks good on television, speaks well, and suits the living room audience.
However, the decisive blow in the Kake Gakuen issue was the complete failure to report the comments of former Governor Kato and Mr. Hara.
Had the process they described been properly reported, the public would surely have been convinced.
Kato.
It is clearly reporting done with an ulterior motive.
Suenobu.
I was shocked when I read the newspapers the next day.
The same was true of television.
Nothing was reported at all.
After re-interviewing sources and confirming the facts, I asked program staff, “Why aren’t you covering this?” — and they said nothing.
To be continued.