Speaker’s Bio

After a successful career at NHK, Mr. Tateiwa has become an executive editor of the Seeds for News Japan, a vice chair of FactCheck Initiative Japan and an executive director of Japan Center of Money and Politics. He is an author of six books including award winning ‘This Is Fact Checking.’ Mr. Tateiwa was a visiting journalist at American University from 2010 to 2011 and 2016 to 2017.

Summary

Mr. Tateiwa’s talk focused on how Japanese media gathered information and created stories around it. Mr. Tateiwa left NHK in 2016 after investigating that government’s plan of decommissioning Fukushima nuclear plant was impossible. NHK didn’t allow him to run this story in Japanese, only in English. Mr. Tateiwa sees the future of the journalism as independent internet-based nonprofit organizations.

To illustrate his point, he used a story created by Japanese media about President Trump as an example. During his first press conference as a president-elect, Donald Trump was asked about many things, including conflict of interests and credibility and capacity of some government members. He briefly mentioned Japan in that context; however, the mainstream Japanese media headlined at that time: “The President criticized Japan for unfair trade.” In fact, they picked up some words out of the context and created their own story in hope it can attract the attention of Japanese audience. Mr. Tateiwa realized they were manipulating and started checking the US and Japanese media reports on Trump. Mr. Tateiwa believes that we cannot really understand who Trump is based on limited coverage of Japanese media that only focuses on US-Japan relations, also giving some attention to the US-Korea and US-China partnerships.

Another media strategy includes showing one video and telling a different story at the same time. Mr. Tateiwa explained the importance of fact-checking and the main principle of fact-checking journalists which is not to spread words without checking. They find thousands of false or misleading claims and have a ranking from 1 Pinocchio (true) to 4 Pinocchio (lie). Another fact-checking association is called PolitiFact. They use another scale from True to Pants on Fire (completely untrue, ridiculous claim).

Recently, fact-checking has become an international movement involving not only developed countries but also South America and Africa. If fact-checkers find mistakes in major news agencies reports, they contact the channel and ask for corrections. South Korea is a leader in Asia and probably, globally in the area of fact-checking. They hold nation-wide fact-checking contests among citizens.

Mr. Tateiwa noticed that recently, not only politicians from conservative parties, such as Restoration Party in Osaka but also leftists started manipulating information and using misleading claims. He gave an example of a politician from Japan Communist Party criticizing Prime Minister Abe and advocating for progressive income tax, to have a heavier tax burden for the rich people. In response, Prime Minister Abe said many things and finally said “it’s ridiculous”. However, reporting his reply, the media cut out the middle part and combined JCP politician’s question with an answer “it’s ridiculous”. Given how widespread this tendency has become, Mr. Tateiwa believes that there is a need to involve non-professional fact-checkers such as college students and housewives.

It is also important to cooperate on the international level. Mr. Tateiwa is also a board member of the Investigative Journalism Network in Asia. Another important way to find the truth is first-hand experience, “going to see it by yourself”. As long as we stick to “sources”, it is hard to tell the truth. Mr. Tateiwa concluded with an inspiring quote from Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post: “The truth, no matter how bad, is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run”.

His presentation was followed by a discussion with the audience who asked questions regarding media propaganda, government restrictions on media freedom in Japan, the reasons why the audience is more attracted to lies than to the truth. Mr. Tateiwa explained some practices of Japanese journalists such as paper circulation system at 3 am to find out if there are major discrepancies with leading newspapers and change the contents if needed. He said that the people preferred to hear what they wanted to hear and traced this tendency to conformism. Once again, he stressed the importance of journalism as one of the pillars of democracy, along with the academia.

Written by Polina Ivanova (Doctor Student at Graduate School of International Relations)

Photos taken by Radesa Guntur Budipramono (Doctor Student at Graduate School of International Relations)