Media coverage of Japan is naturally obsessed with the drama of the Fukushima nuclear power plants because, you know, it would be boring to report the grim facts about the thousands of Japanese lives potentially still at risk from exposure to cold weather, uncertain water supplies, failing waste-water treatment, disease outbreaks, and food shortages, and the day-by-day struggle to dig out and figure out how to rebuild, etc. No, the media needs to do what it does best in these situations: spread panic. Too bad we don’t have George W. Bush to kick around; I’m sure the lefty press would figure out the angle, and mention Katrina somehow.
Amazingly the worst among American papers may well be the front page of the Wall Street Journal, whose Thursday six-column headline takes the biscuit for irresponsibility: “U.S. Sounds Alarm on Radiation.” From that headline, you’d think the government was worried about radiation risk blowing across the ocean to our shores. But it’s just the unremarkable story that the U.S. advises a larger evacuation zone near the reactors in Japan than the Japanese are calling for. This deserves a breathless six-column head? Even the New York Times looks sober and reasonable by comparison.
Kudos belong to The Atlantic, which has had several good online pieces, including this one from Christine Russell, which calmly explains how to judge the risks and effects of even the worst-case scenario, and this one from Joshua Green on why we may not give up on nuclear power despite this disaster (short summary: It’s not 1979 any more, and Jane Fonda seems happy to stay in retirement). Not to mention this jarring pictorial, with some of the more gruesome images behind a screen.
Finally, somewhere in-between is this Bloomberg/Business Week piece that makes out Japan’s nuclear management to be the rough equivalent of housing policy under Fannie Mae. (Hat tip: my investment-banker guy. Hey, if Jonah can have an expert posse, I want one too.)
Inspired by Steven Hayward's moral outrage at the media's failure to cover the humanitarian crisis in Japan, I looked through my RSS feed for Corner posts about the earthquake the day it struck, before the nuclear crisis.
There were two posts about Japan that day, both a sentence long.
There have been a lot of Corner posts about Japan since then, but not so many about cold weather, water supplies, disease or trapped survivors. They've mostly been posts about the nuclear crisis or (just as often) how terrible it is that the nuclear crisis may endanger nuclear power in America.
To Hayward's credit, one of the very few posts here about Japan that didn't obsess over the nuclear crisis was his own, from the day after the earthquake struck. But it was only a sentence long: External Link
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThose photographs...
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuseredfate,
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDid it ever occur to you that the reason Corner posts did not mention much about cold weather, etc. is because the news media has not been reporting much about it? Perhaps I'm wrong, but most, if not all, of the Cornerites' jobs aren't news reporters covering events in Japan. Thus, how would they know?
You know who's good? ZDF, the German TV network news. Factual, unalarming, also reporting extensively on the human suffering from earthquake and tsunami. It's remarkable given how much stronger the anti-nuke movement is in Germany.
Coverage from ARD, the other main national network,is more like the U.S. hysteria-inducing reporting.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWarrior,
I'm going to assume you're not seriously claiming there is no way for anyone to learn about the human disaster in Japan, since there has been extensive coverage of it from the MSM to Japanese TV to on-site blogs and Twitter feeds. There's just been more coverage, on the whole, of the nuclear crisis.
Do you think the purpose of this site is to highlight important issues that aren't getting their fair due in the mainstream press? Or is it just to parrot the mainstream coverage? Or to whine about that coverage? Because the latter two activities are just about all I've seen anyone on the Corner do in regards to Japan.
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