Ignoring Neutrality Mandate

A giant of public broadcasting in Japan is growingly getting wild. Its board members of management have consecutively been criticized on their speech about recognition of history like the way Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, had gone. There is an argument that nomination of them was under influence of Abe administration. When politics injects ideology into a broadcaster, it would no longer be neutral journalism, making society ill informed and deteriorated.

The chairman of Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), Katsuto Momii, apologized on his comment about comfort women in the Committee of Budget in the House of Representatives on Monday. He had shown his recognition that prostitute was prevalent in other countries. It was highly unusual in the Diet for the chairman to explain about his words.

The seriousness of the problem in NHK is seen in a fact that such a kind of inappropriate speech is not limited to one person. Naoki Hyakuta, a member of Management Committee of NHK, made a supporting speech for a candidate of Tokyo gubernatorial election, Toshio Tamogami, in which Hyakuta denied the fact of Nanjing Massacre. “There was no such a thing as Nanjing Massacre. Every nation committed cruel activities,” told Hyakuta. Oops, he was not a revisionist, but appeared to be a writer of conservative fantasy.

Another member of the Board, Michiko Hasegawa, made an amazing comment as a woman professor, which said that it was rational for men to work outside home and for women to stay home for raising kids in this low birth rate society. Mainichi Shimbun reported that she praised an ultra right-wing activist who shot himself to die in the building of Asahi Shimbun for protesting Asahi’s reports and terrorizing the newspaper.

A program director of NHK Radio persuaded a professor, who planned to discuss economic benefit of stopping nuclear power plants, not to tell the opinion before the end of Tokyo gubernatorial election. Some candidates raise this issue as a crucial point of the election, while others try to ignore it.

The Broadcasting Act requires all broadcasters to discuss a controversial issue from as many viewpoints as possible. It prohibits them to lean on a specific political group. Namely, NHK is a public broadcasting corporation, which management is based on the income of license fee of recipients, and which annual budget needs approval of the Diet. In those respects, the speeches and attitude of NHK officials have been inappropriate regarding neutrality of a public broadcaster. If the leaders of Abe administration want to remove doubts on their intervention in the management of NHK, they need to make clear of the relationship between NHK and politics.