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In Japan, bid to stifle criticism is working
Martin Fackler, International New York Times, Apr. 28, 2015
http://eedition.inyt.com/epaper/viewer.aspx accessed May 1, 2015
Martin Fackler, International New York Times, Apr. 28, 2015
http://eedition.inyt.com/epaper/viewer.aspx accessed May 1, 2015
日本安倍加大對媒體管制。批評他政策的媒體已開始自我審查。批評他的名嘴被解雇。這一切反映日本社會對他政策不滿在增加。
林中斌 2015.5.1
‘‘I have suffered intense bashing by the prime minister’s office,’’ Mr. Koga told his visibly flabbergasted host late last month, saying he had been removed as commentator because of critical statements he had made about Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Later in the program, Mr. Koga held up a sign that read ‘‘I am not Abe,’’ a play on the slogan of solidarity for journalists slain in January at a French satirical newspaper.
The outburst created a public firestorm, and not only because of the spectacle of Mr. Koga, a dour-faced former top government official, seemingly throwing away his career as a television commentator in front of millions of viewers. His angry show of defiance also focused national attention on the right-leaning government’s increased strong-arming of the news media to reduce critical coverage.
Many journalists and political experts say the Abe government is trying to engineer a fundamental shift in the balance of power between his administration and the news media, using tactics to silence criticism that go beyond anything his predecessors tried and that have frustrated many journalists. These have included more aggressive complaints to the bosses of critical journalists and commentators like Mr. Koga, and more blatant retaliation against outlets that persist in faulting the administration. At the same time, Mr. Abe has tried to win over top media executives and noted journalists with private sushi lunches.
‘‘The Abe government is showing an obsession with the media that verges on paranoia,’’ said Keigo Takeda, a former editor in chief at Newsweek Japan who is now a respected freelance journalist. ‘‘I have never seen this level of efforts to micromanage specific newspapers and TV programs.’’
While government officials deny that they are trying to curtail free speech, many journalists, commentators and media experts say the government campaign has already tempered coverage of the Abe government. They say that even once feisty outlets like Hodo Station, the news program that had used Mr. Koga as a commentator, are now censoring their own coverage or removing critical voices to avoid drawing official ire.
Some criticism has also fallen on news outlets for rolling over without a fight, particularly since some of these tactics are considered routine in other democracies, like the United States. Many major news organizations have been accused of self-censorship, bringing renewed attention on what experts here say is a weak tradition among the Japanese press of serving as a watchdog on power.
Scholars describe a mood of fear spreading beyond the news media into the broader society, including in education, where the Abe government is pressing textbook publishers to adhere more closely to the official line on topics like the 1937 Nanjing massacre and the use of so-called comfort women in wartime military brothels.
‘‘These unprecedented attacks on The Asahi and other media are creating a closed conformity in which the whole society is becoming afraid to say something different,’’ said Tatsuro Hanada, a professor of media studies at Waseda University in Tokyo. ‘‘Abe is adeptly using this for his own political ends.’’
Mr. Koga’s accusations offer a rare glimpse of how a formerly hard-hitting news program appears to have toned down its coverage.
While never a favorite of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, Hodo Station felt the pressure rise after a show in late January in which Mr. Koga criticized Mr. Abe’s handling of a hostage crisis in Syria that resulted in the deaths of the two Japanese captives. Mr. Koga and employees of the network that airs Hodo Station, TV Asahi, who asked not to be identified because they were still working there, said that before the program was even over, the network’s political reporters were getting angry calls and emails from political secretaries in the prime minister’s office.
They said the tactic seemed to succeed in turning network reporters against Hodo Station, which has a separate production staff. The reporters and their editors demanded that the program show them its scripts beforehand to ensure that coverage was ‘‘ balanced,’’ something Hodo Station’s producer resisted. The government stepped up the pressure against the show again in February, when a top official in the Abe government, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, used an off-record briefing with journalists to speak scathingly of the ‘‘completely mistaken’’ comments about the hostage incident by a ‘‘television commentator.’’
According to a transcript of the Feb. 24 briefing, Mr. Suga warned that the network might have broken the law by airing the comments. ‘‘If it were me, I’d tell them that they violated the broadcast law,’’ Mr. Suga said, laughing, according to the transcript.
Mr. Koga and others said the transcript had made its way to TV Asahi’s chairman, Hiroshi Hayakawa. ‘‘This was a warning to TV Asahi to get rid of me,’’ Mr. Koga said. ‘‘Suga knew this memo would be seen by all major news outlets, and be shown to Chairman Hayakawa.’’
Mr. Koga said that that was exactly what happened. In February, after three and a half years of appearing at least once a month as a commentator on Hodo Station, he found out that he would no longer be back on the show. At about the same time, another critical commentator and a producer who had refused to give in to the political pressure were also removed from the show.
Mr. Koga said that move led to his outburst on March 27, his final appearance as commentator.
The network refused interview requests. Its chairman, Mr. Hayakawa, denied in a news conference that political pressure had played a role in what he called a routine decision to change the lineup of commentators. Mr. Suga has told reporters that Mr. Koga’s charges of political pressure were ‘‘ baseless.’’
Still, the governing party is keeping up the pressure, summoning TV Asahi executives two weeks ago to explain how Mr. Koga was allowed to make his accusations on live television. The party explained the summons by saying that those accusations may themselves have violated the broadcast law.
‘‘Some don’t like his method, but Mr. Koga did draw public attention to the Abe government’s pressure on the media,’’ said Takashi Uesugi, a media critic and onetime researcher at The New York Times who runs an independent online news program. ‘‘This was an inconvenient truth for both the government and the self-censoring journalists.’’
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