Gotcha

A TENET of journalism in some quarters is that three examples make a credible story. The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s leading left-of-centre newspaper, with a circulation of 7.3m, is battling for its reputation after a third embarrassing retraction. On September 14th it admitted that it had faked an interview with the boss of Nintendo, a video-game company. In August and September it withdrew two, more consequential, articles. The first had to do with the army’s wartime use of “comfort women”, ie, women forced into prostitution. The second had to do with the catastrophe at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in 2011. The fear is that the Asahi, the most forceful of Japan’s establishment-minded big dailies, will in future pull its punches.

Japan’s vocal right is gloating over the newspaper’s embarrassment. A clutch of conservative magazines had pummelled the Asahi for months on the subject of wartime sex slaves. Starting in the 1980s, it had published over a dozen stories based on accounts by a former imperial army soldier, Seiji Yoshida. He described how in the Korean countryside in 1943-44 he had rounded up women for army brothels. His accounts quickly came into question, and in 1997 the Asahi Shimbun said it could not verify the testimony. At that time, says Takaaki Mizuno, a former Asahi correspondent, newsmen knew full well what that meant, “yet there was no clear explanation to our readers”.

The paper’s top brass came clean painfully slowly, after those involved in preparing the stories had left. On September 11th executives apologised on television. The editor was also fired. Even the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has since weighed in. The Asahi, he said, should explain its errors over the comfort women to the world. Fellow right-wingers in his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are calling (yet again) for a revision of a government statement issued in 1993 acknowledging Japan’s responsibility over the comfort women. That is despite the broad historical facts about forced prostitution by the imperial army remaining unchanged.

The Asahi’s error over events at Fukushima Dai-ichi appears to be more nuanced. In May it claimed that panicking workers defied orders and fled the crippled nuclear plant. In fact they were merely confused about instructions, as recently published testimony by Dai-ichi’s late manager underscores. In the Nintendo episode the Asahi misrepresented as an interview some remarks that the company’s chief executive had made online.

A former senior editor at the paper says the Asahi Shimbun will now struggle to recover from the embarrassments. More revelations may come, he says, and many readers may leave. Already, its right-wing rival, the Yomiuri Shimbun, has seized the opportunity. The world’s highest-circulation newspaper (with a print run of 9.2m) has distributed pamphlets to Asahi readers cataloguing its rival’s errors over comfort women and offering a hotline for subscribers to switch.

The Asahi’s transgressions come in a country that is one of the last remaining redoubts of trust in newspapers. Japanese place more confidence in papers than in local officials, the courts or the police. Even in the internet age, the main papers are still delivered to readers’ letterboxes. Kaori Hayashi of the University of Tokyo argues that the public thinks of newspapers as loyally serving nation and society. It fosters media subservience to the establishment.

Still, the Asahi has been bolder than other papers. Over the years it has reported on more big political scandals than other papers have. It has not slavishly adhered to the system of kisha, or reporters’, clubs. In these, media organisations themselves help restrict the access of other (unapproved) journalists to ministries and other official bodies. When the annals of the life of Emperor Hirohito were released this month, the imperial household allowed access to the document only to its own kisha club, despite the story’s international appeal. Neither the Asahi’s comfort-women stories nor its Fukushima coverage drew upon the kisha clubs.

The Asahi Shimbun may now grow more timid. As it is, the scandals suggest the behaviour of a typical Japanese corporate or government hierarchy concerned with its own preservation. A chief reason for the Asahi failing for so long to admit that its comfort-women stories were false was that journalists involved in the original reporting had risen through the ranks and wielded power. Reporters are not so unlike functionaries after all.