The recent wining-and-dining scandals involving the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications were sparked by the reporting of weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun, which raises the question of why the mainstream media didn't catch on to these matters first, since they seem to have been going on for some time.

The conventional response is that weekly magazines, due to the way they pursue stories for the sake of sensationalism, do not always follow journalistic “decorum” the way daily newspapers and TV stations do. The first scoop came about after Shukan Bunshun stalked Seigo Suga, the eldest son of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, and caught him entertaining ministry officials as a representative of Tohokushinsha Film Corp. So while the tabloid press sometimes resorts to dodgy practices, such practices offer them more opportunities to find these kinds of stories.

But once these stories break, major media usually picks them up and elaborates. During a discussion on the web program Videonews.com, veteran freelance journalist Tetsuo Jimbo mentioned that the missing element in the story was why Seigo Suga was entertaining ministry officials. Given Tohokushinsha's satellite broadcast business, it doesn't sound like a mystery, since the ministry oversees the nation's airwaves, but as Jimbo's interlocutor, sociologist Shinji Miyadai, said, nobody even knows why Seigo Suga was working for Tohokushinsha in the first place.