Govt. Plans New Body to Police the Media

According to an article at Japan Today, the new DPJ controlled government is planning to establish a body that would monitor and issue ‘recommendations’ to the media to ‘rectify’ cases in which broadcasters make slanderous comments or commit other violations. This is a very worrying development.

According to the brand new Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Haraguchi Kazuhiro, it is important to ‘create a third-party organization to secure the freedom of speech and broadcasting’… I’m not quite sure if he understands the irony of this statement… Currently Japan has a Broadcasting Ethics & Program Improvement Organization which is run by the broadcasters, which reviews and makes recommendations regarding problematic programs. This is basically a self-governing organization, which doesn’t have specific power to demand action. The bill which is being prepared for passage through the Diet in 2011 would apparently create a body which does have the power to require action. Not only this, but this same board would be responsible for allocating radio waves and monitoring the broadcasting and communications businesses. In other words, the power to compell action, with the threat of losing licenses…

For such a body to even be considered is amazing. In the US, there has been considerable talk about a ‘fairness doctrine’ to police the content of radio, and possibly even the internet, but few truly believe that such a law could pass the US Congress. In Japan, I’m not so sure. Naturally the media will have something to say about the matter, and hopefully they will be able to make enough noise for the plan to be scrapped. But this is a worrying development for a government that is only just starting to feel its feet. The DPJ may see this as simply the Japan version of the US FCC, but it sounds like it will be tasked with even more power than this.

Ostensibly, the plan includes measures to control potential slander and other ‘violations’, but I would have thought that these would be better covered by enacting and enforcing laws against slander, rather than attempting to strong-arm broadcasters that are suspected of such violations. If the government believes that a violation has been made, let them take the matter through the courts. Otherwise they should keep their hands off.

Certainly I am not against regulation of broadcast content to some extent, for the public good. For me, this would include things like pornography, excessive violence and the like. However this should be limited to self-regulation by media organizations who are doing a pretty good job of this right now (and who are accountable to ratings and advertisers – ie the public), and not to governmental control that reaches into content and free speech. This is a slippery slope, in a country where the government already exercises a great deal of control in various industries through its ‘administrative recommendations’, even when specific laws are not on the books. There have been questions already about the role of government ministers in determining the content of NHK news and other programming, and this move would only further muddy the water.

What Japan needs is a more autonomous and independent media (free of government AND big business control). This proposed law would seek to take things in the opposite direction, and the Japanese people must not allow it. Media content in Japan is already far more homogenous than that of countries like the US, where a whole range of views on any issue can be found easily – from the ridiculous to the sublime… In Japan, you need to look a lot harder to find alternatives to the main stream media story. The way that the media deal with issues like war, global warming, and other social issues are examples of how much of a ‘single note’ the media can play at times in Japan. For the government to institute a further control on this is not only unnecessary, but dangerous. What Japan needs most is much more, and not less free flow of information.