More than a week after the massive earthquake and tsunami of March 11, Japan's commercial broadcasters are still weighing the crisis as it develops. The weekend following the catastrophe, all planned programming was canned for round-the-clock coverage of the tragedy, and whatever you want to say about the choice of visuals there was certainly plenty to choose from: video footage both professional and amateur showing the destruction as it happened in horrifying real time. By Monday morning, many of these images had become etched in our brains and in the brains of people in faraway countries. The reaction was the same: Utter disbelief at the scale of the disaster. But people overseas didn't have to contend with the uneven tone of the local coverage.
If there is a unifying theme to this coverage, it's " remain calm," which means the media has had to qualify its mission to be truthful and helpful with the need to ensure that what they say doesn't cause alarm. That became virtually impossible as aftershocks continued, and the effort to keep matters cool but informative has faltered on occasion, nowhere more obviously than in the coverage of the damaged Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
As they do with any major ongoing news story, TV stations call on experts to provide background and commentary, and the parade of bad toupees and nervous tics that passes as Japanese academia's nuclear power punditry seemed endless. Half of these men were from the University of Tokyo, while the rest taught at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Prime Minister Naoto Kan's alma mater), but what most of them had in common was a pronounced inability to explain what was happening in terms that newspeople could understand, much less utilize.