The following is from a series of columns in today's Sankei Shimbun by one of the best active reporters, Rui Abiru, titled 'the Asahi uses the Internet to criticize the Abe administration.'
I stopped subscribing to the Asahi Shimbun six years ago in August, so I had no idea what kind of reporting the Asahi is doing now. I was stunned when I read his column.
The other day, in the dentist's waiting room, I read the 'weekly Asahi,' which I hadn't read in a long time, and I wrote, 'Asahi is crazy, and the Asahi newspaper is a group of stupid people.'
More than my editorial, the Asahi is crazy.
The emphasis in the sentence except for the headline is mine.
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Although I was dismayed that they were repeating the physical operation, I reconsidered the fact that they may have changed the way they attacked the Shinzo Abe administration.
It was from reading the morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun Tokyo headquarters on the 12th.
A new pattern.
The top page of the Asahi Shimbun on that day included the front-page articles 'Protest Tweets Against Proposed Amendments to the Public Prosecutor's Office Law Surge' and 'Prime Minister Poised to Enact Diet' as well as the top two, three, four, and 25 pages of the newspaper.
They also the front-page column 'Tensei Jingo' and the editorial were all critical of the proposed amendments to the Public Prosecutor's Office Law that would extend the retirement age of prosecutors.
It's as if the amendment if enacted, will turn the world upside down and destroy Japan.
Come to think of it; the Asahi Shimbun has devoted its pages to the same theme of criticism of the regime, whether it was deliberating on the National Security Act and the Act on the Protection of Specified Secrets or the Moritomo and Kake Academies issue.
Each time, they tried to induce public opinion by shouting that the constitution has been trampled, that democracy has been destroyed, that it is a return to pre-war times, but somehow things have subsided.
The title of the editorial on the 12th, 'An outrageous act of taunting the people,' is probably nothing unusual to Asahi readers.
If that's all, it's the usual story.
What struck me as a new pattern was that Asahi, which usually points out that there are many falsehoods and hoaxes on the Internet, used Twitter as a material and basis for attacking the regime.
Since the night of the 9th, there has been a spate of posts on Twitter from celebrities, including actors and singers, saying, 'I'm protesting the proposed amendment to the Public Prosecutor's Office Law.' Retweets were repeated, and the number of posts exceeded 6.8 million just after 8 p.m. on the 11th.
The front-page article highlighted the high number of posts, while the two-page, four-page, and 25-page articles on Tensei Jingo also featured the tweet.
Usually, Asahi seems to view the net space full of criticism and protests against them as an enemy. Still, when it comes to using them to criticize the Abe administration, I am again impressed by the fact that they are with no concern of how their Act looks like.
Furthermore, in the article'The LDP turning its back on the voices of the protesters, 'on page 26, 13th, they take great care in criticism that the government and the ruling party put suspicion on the credibility of the voice of the people.
On the other hand, it neglects to mention that the originator of the public's voice understands the purpose and reasons for the proposed amendments to the Prosecutor's Office Law and asks the public for their own ideas.
In the June issue of 'Monthly Seiron,' now on sale, IT journalist Mutsumi Miyawaki points out the following;
We will check the cases of the recent mass media reports that label the source of information as 'the Internet' and label it as 'unverified information' to escape from the burden of proof and to 'misuse' it as 'capable of producing news.'
incomprehensible logic
In its 26-page article, Asahi critically quoted the prime minister and his staff as saying that 'one in 20 Japanese people (tweeted) is an unlikely figure.' Still, they themselves do not believe that one in 20 people really tweeted.
According to the article, Fujio Toriumi, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Engineering, analyzed 4.73 million tweets (including retweets) and found that 'about 588,000 accounts were actually involved,' and that 2% of these accounts, or about 12,000, were spread by repeated retweets, accounting for about half of the total.
I don't understand the logic of Asahi.
(Editorial Writer and Political Editor.)
＊The employees of newspapers all over the world is so ashamed that it wants to crawl under the rug because they have considered the Asahi Shimbun to be the best newspaper in Japan.
Some of them have been using Asahi's articles for their anti-Japanese propaganda, even though they are aware of the awfulness of Asahi's view of self-deprecation.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung used the Asahi article to reduce Japan to the same country as the Nazis, mitigate their own crimes, and make about half of the population think anti-Japanese.
It is something that only the lowest level of people can do.
It's not just the New York Times and the Washington Post and others that should be ashamed of themselves.
It is the reporting that raises doubts about the quality of a newspaper.
