Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Image - The Tokyo Shimbun Against The Official Secrets Act

A whimsical graphic, perhaps not very impressive...but below is a reproduction of the entire Saturday, 26 October 2013 Tokyo Shimbun (please click on the image to see it in full). I have blocked out in red articles or opinion pieces on the Official Secrets Act, submitted to the Diet the day before (I have blocked out advertising in yellow, for the sake of...oh...just for the heck of it).

The story takes up a lot of of the real news real estate:



To what extent does the editorial board of Tokyo Shimbun dislike the official secrets bill?

-- All of the news space on the front page not devoted to the weather is devoted to the bill (the weather stuff was sort of important: two typhoons were sweeping past the country that day).

-- 17 articles and op-eds are on the bill (this is not including the reporting on U.S. spying on the communications of Europeans and their leaders, which one might want to include as a corollary of the official secrets bill)

-- the editorial cartoon is on the bill

The editors did not even feel a need to pile on: the editorials are on the proposed Industrial Competitiveness Act and the falsification of population data in Aiichi Prefecture.

3 comments:

Luinil said...

I wonder what is their policy about the website of the Tokyo Shinbun, there is almost nothing about this law on it's homepage. (I could find only the a link to the text of the law).

MTC said...

Unknown -

Search the site or Google news for 特定秘密保護法案.

The Chunichi Group seems to be a traditional media organization with a strong commitment to dead tree publishing. Their online content is risible.

Anonymous said...

I'd be curious to see what extent have the other papers spent in terms of "dead tree real estate" as well. Looking at online content it seems at least Asahi, Sankei and the likes have provided more than the average amount of teaser article length for this particular topic.