A Tale of Two Disasters

For better or worse, the world has become an eventful place in the year 2011. There are uprisings all over. And if that was not enough, the earthquake, tsunami and the threat of a nuclear meltdown in Japan brought journalists from the world over to its shores. However, it is interesting how the media has covered this particular tragedy that threatened to turn into a catastrophe.

The problem in Japan was that reporters had to report on two different incidents that, though related, had different impacts on the human psyche. The destruction caused by the earthquake and tsunami was mammoth. The impact on the Japanese psyche as well as its manifestation in different parts of the world can be understood. However, the threat of a nuclear meltdown was a different ballgame all together. Since most media houses had sent a lone journalist to cover the events, it fell upon normal foreign correspondents to deal with something as technical and sensitive as a prospective meltdown. Naturally, throughout the entire episode, journalists were seen grappling with unfamiliar terms and technical jargon. Others who had probably never ventured inside this territory came in handy for propagandists from both pro and anti-nuclear lobbies.

Industrial disasters (and scientific too) are never easy to cover. The minimum that any media organisation is expected to do is to send their science correspondents. And that was missing in Japan. The coverage bordered both on sensationalism and denial. While many publications and channels were guilty of both, there were many who took an editorial stand on the very first day and stuck to it even though realities changed dramatically on the ground. There was remarkable difference in the lexicon used by Japanese and regional media outlets from that of the media from outside the region.       
For example, the day the media started reporting the possible crisis, i.e. the night of 15th and 16th March, the focus of English newspapers in Japan shifted to the disaster at Fukushima. Papers analysed the incident differently. The Daily Yomiuri mentioned that a series of fires broke out at the Unit 4 reactor “but the flames apparently soon subsided.” On the other hand, The Japan Times, based in Tokyo like its competitor The Daily Yomiuri, took the government to task for keeping the population in the dark.

The publications in the adjoining countries were naturally worried more about radiation and its impact in case it spread out, and less about how the Japanese were coping with the crisis. South Korea’s Chosunilbo reported that “concerns are rising in Korea about a major radiation leak from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan. The fallout from the devastating Chernobyl disaster in 1986 spread northwest to Stockholm, Sweden and west to Berlin, Germany, each some 1,100 km away, which is roughly the distance between Seoul and Fukushima.”


In the western front, Taiwan’s China Post wrote, “The Taiwanese public will not need to evacuate, take high doses of iodine or hide in their homes even in the worst-case scenario — if all ten reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plants suffer meltdowns and release radioactive materials, an official from the Atomic Energy Council (AEC) said yesterday.” Clearly, the report indeed had a sense of urgency. However, it was nothing in comparison to what some of the western papers had to write. “Japan nuclear crisis: 50 brave men the last hope in crisis,” read the headline in Australia’s Herald Sun. The panic button in Britain was pressed by The Telegraph that put a headline “Japan disaster: nuclear experts warn power plant is ‘out of control’”. On the other side of the Atlantic, “Peril and Confusion at Japanese Nuclear Plant,” cried The New York Times. It said: “International alarm about the nuclear crisis appeared to be growing, as France announced it was urging its citizens living in Tokyo to head to safer areas or to leave the country. Germany urged its citizens to move to areas farther away from the stricken nuclear plant.”

Surprisingly, as mainstream newspapers intruded into tabloid space, tabloids like The Daily Mirror and Sun showed remarkable self-restraint and actually refrained from their usual Apocalyptic prophesies. However, Fox TV lived up to its reputation and promptly showed a club cum discotheque, Shibuyaeggman, as one of the possible nuclear sites under threat. But that is expected from Fox.  The Guardian, of all the papers, gave space to one Dr Melanie Windridge, who was introduced as “a freelance science communicator and academic visitor in nuclear fusion research”, who decried the anti-nuclear lobby and used the chance to propound some astonishing generalisations that would have ruffled a few feathers of every self-respecting human being on the earth.

It does not matter that these western commentators found out the fallacies in the Chernobyl discourse only when it came back to haunt them. When Chernobyl happened, these same western critics used Biblical expressions like ‘apocalypse’ and ‘exodus’ to malign Soviet Russia. The discourse suited them well as it dented USSR’s reputation as a responsible nuclear state. However, when an ally, Japan, was stuck by the same tragedy, the language and lexicon both changed.