In Japan, A Wave of Media Distrust Post-Tsunami

The article basically talks about the bad media in Japan or what they would call "masu-gomi" which means rubbishy mass media. The issue regarding this masu-gomi is based on the earthquake and tsunami that struck a part of Japan in 2011. At the time of the disaster, the Japanese government has been found guilty of not releasing the complete truth about the decontamination work at the effected power plant which was moving at a very slow speed despite the urgency. The citizens of Japan then later blame the media for being a PR machine instead of a medium that feeds the people with truth of what is going on. Later on in the article it is said that people of that wants to know of the truth have to rely on the internet to feed them with it rather than depending on the media which is corrupt and controlled by the government.

The issue that is going to be mainly focused on is, can the internet fulfill its role as the new media?. Firstly, it is said that broadcast TV is a push medium which means that the broadcasters are the ones deciding what is going to be shown to the public whereas the web or the internet is a pull medium which means that nothing comes to the user unless it is clicked on or in other words the user is in control (Naughton, 2006). The differences between both of this is that people who depend on the web can find out whatever they want as long as it exist on the internet but the ones who depend on the media will only see or hear what they are shown or told because of the control factor coming out of the broadcaster and the government. Besides that, there are four factors on proving that the internet is capable of breaking down political control which are it has a non-hierarchical nature, it has an interactive nature, it has a global nature and lastly it is near impossible to control the medium (Gan et al. 2004).

References

Naughton, J. (2006). Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem.Available: http://reuteursinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/discussion/blogging.html. Last accessed 12th June 2013.