Concern continues over press freedoms in Japan: David Kaye & Jake Adelstein

This week David Kaye, UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, spoke to the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan about his experience hearing out stakeholders in the continuing debate over eroding political reporting freedoms in the country (video at FCCJ YouTube):

“I think this is a significant problem that the Broadcast Act allows for regulation by the government of the media,” he said, adding the law should be amended to prevent the state from being in a position to adjudicate what constitutes “bias.” 

“Journalists in those kisha clubs tend to be focused very much together in this same kind of social network. And I think that allows for mechanisms of pressure. It may be soft pressure. It may be a kind of peer pressure that’s very difficult to resist,” he said. 

“It’s common for journalists (in general) to describe their role as a watchdog … to not just take government information as a kind of scribe and copy it and put it online or put it in a newspaper or repeat it on a broadcast network. But (the role is) to question it; it’s to question government policies. It’s to question government conclusions,” 

“It is normal for government to push back against journalists’ reporting. … But it’s the role of the media to push back on the government as well,”

Japan Times coverage of conference 

Jake Adelstein reiterated the situation in the Los Angeles Times:

'Veteran reporters in Japan have criticized Abe’s government for applying pressure to reporters, but also decry the increasing self-censorship going on in the country’s press. “To me, the most serious problem is self-restraint by higher-ups at broadcast stations,” Soichiro Tahara, one of the country’s most revered journalists, told reporters last month. 

“The Abe administration’s threats to media independence, the turnover in media personnel in recent months and the increase in self-censorship within leading media outlets are endangering the underpinnings of democracy in Japan,” Reporters Without Borders concluded in its report released this month about declining media freedoms in Japan.'