Japan’s media fails its watchdog role: Lessons learned and unlearned from the 2011 earthquake and the Fukushima disaster

The Disaster and Media Research Group conducted for the first time, extensive, in-depth interviews with newsroom executives of 14 Japanese mainstream national media outlets (8 newspapers and wire services, and 6 broadcasting networks) on their reflections of Japanese media coverage of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. The Japanese media takes pride in their ability to swiftly communicate news alerts and evacuation announcements. However, they recognized little issue in merely conveying official information from the government and power industry in coverage of the nuclear disaster, rather than demonstrating journalistic effort by seeking alternative sources, particularly for assessing the seriousness of radiation exposure. The main findings from the interviews were that Japanese media (1) are well prepared for broadcasting of immediate reports on seismic scales and tsunami alerts, but less so for assessing the risks of nuclear disaster; (2) share the view that the media’s role is to cooperate with the government to communicate during emergencies, even if this means sacrificing their watchdog role; (3) are steadfast in their belief in traditional platforms while lacking a strategy to adopt the web and smartphone; (4) have little or no interest in collaborative news gathering or journalism sharing; and (5) are negative to the idea of training reporters to specialize in nuclear science, nuclear plant safety measures, or radiation exposure (with the exception of two media interviewed).