Drawing on Eitaro Ogawa’s data-driven analysis, this essay demonstrates that Japanese television coverage of key security legislation has gone far beyond biased reporting, amounting instead to a form of media-driven totalitarianism, as evidenced by overwhelming imbalances in airtime allocation.

2016-03-01

The following is taken from an essay published in the April issue of the monthly magazine WiLL by Ogawa Eitaro, who had previously presented a superb paper on Sayuri Yoshinaga in the magazine Seiron.

He proved, numerically and physically, that everything I had been saying about the outrageous nature of TBS’s NEWS23 and TV Asahi’s Hōdō Station was perfectly correct.

All emphasis in the text, except for the title, is mine.

Do Not Tolerate Illegal Reporting! — Ogawa Eitaro

The “Social Unfitness” of TBS
Totalitarianism Through Television

First, I ask that you look at the pie charts on the following page.

The upper chart shows the balance of approval and opposition toward the Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets, and the lower chart shows the same balance at the time of the passage of the security-related legislation, based on airtime in major television news programs. The survey was conducted by the Japan Peace Studies Institute, of which I serve as executive director. Narration, statements by anchors and commentators, and various interviews were classified as supportive, opposing, or neutral toward the legislation, and their airtime was measured down to the second.

One glance makes it immediately clear that every network exhibits extreme bias in the ratio of opinions for and against.

Most notably, TBS’s NEWS23 and TV Asahi’s Hōdō Station, which devoted the longest airtime to these topics, allocated over 80 percent of their coverage to opposing views during the Special Secrets Act debate, and over 90 percent during the security legislation debate—an abnormality of astonishing proportions. Even more unbelievable are the aggregated figures across all broadcasters.

During the Special Secrets Act debate, the ratio of supportive to opposing views was 26 to 74. During the security legislation debate, it reached an astounding 11 to 89.

Even with multiple broadcasters, can this not, in effect, be called television-driven totalitarianism?

Try imagining the reverse.

If every news program on every channel were endlessly praising the Abe administration, liberals and leftists would surely scream hysterically about the “death of democracy.”

No—let me be perfectly clear.

Even if such arguments aligned closely with my own views, I would refuse to live in a country where television, like an imperial rule assistance association, broadcast nothing but uniform praise. It would be deeply repulsive.

This pathological imbalance in approval and opposition reveals that television industry insiders and liberal leftists astonishingly lack any sense of pain when it comes to unfairness.

Of course, most ordinary viewers do not watch the evening news because they want to see a politically colored show. They watch in order to relax at home or in a bar, to reflect on the day’s events, and sometimes to share their own impressions or discuss matters with family or colleagues. Programs such as Asa made Nama Terebi or Takajin no Soko made Itte Iinkai NP are watched precisely because viewers enjoy the host’s personality, provocative remarks by guests, or even the program’s political bias itself—and that, in a sense, constitutes their social role.

But news programs are not political variety shows. When issues of national security—issues that truly divide public opinion and determine the fate of the nation—are at stake, whether all television networks should be allowed to continue broadcasting one-colored political propaganda under the name of “news” should not require elaborate debate in the first place.

The reality shown by the numbers has gone far beyond what can be called “biased reporting.”

To be continued.