A Public Betrayed: An Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and Their Warnings to the West - Hardcover

Gamble, Adam; Watanabe, Takesato

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0895260468 ISBN 13: 9780895260468

Publisher: Regnery, 2004

Synopsis

Reveals how the Japanese media have dangerously overstepped their boundaries and distorted-even wiped out-honest news in favour of government propaganda. And worse, Japanese citizens are frequently persecuted and threatened by the very institution they turn to for truth.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Gamble is a writer and investigative reporter, and the author of In the Footsteps of Thoreau. He has served as publisher at On Cape Publications in Massachusetts since 1995, where he has produced some two-dozen books. During the three years of research that went into A Public Betrayed, he personally interviewed more than 150 individuals.

Takesato Watanabe is a professor of media ethics at Doshisha University in Kyoto and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2001. He is the author of a dozen Japanese-language books, including Information Democracy and the People's Right to Communicate (2000). He is coauthor of the Encyclopedia of Media & Communication Studies (1999). His next book, The Media and Power Structure in Modern Japan, 1945 - 2000, was published in English in 2005 through Harvard University's East Asia Monograph Series.

Ellis S. Krauss is a professor of Japanese politics and policymaking at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Broadcasting Politics in Japan and the coeditor of Beyond Bilateralism: U.S.-Japan Relations in the New Asia-Pacific and of Media and Politics in Japan.

From the Inside Flap

Here is the quintessential example of a people betrayed through the corruption of the very news media that ought to be championing their causes. A Public Betrayed exposes deceptions, lies, and abuses of power in Japan that have led to such profound degrees of misunderstanding, confusion, and suffering that they have inspired the phrase "media atrocities." Key examples include:

Vilifying innocent victims of terrorist attacks
Denying the Holocaust and supporting anti-Semitism
Smearing a prominent Buddhist leader
Whitewashing and denying one of history's worst war crimes, the Nanjing Massacre
Defaming Second World War Japanese military sex slaves or "comfort women"

Thorough, thoughtful, and provocative, this book lays bare the mechanisms and motivations behind these sobering abuses. And as the examples show, the very factors that have contributed to such injustices in Japan have become increasingly predominant in the news-media sectors of the West-factors such as extreme industry consolidation, the growth of nationalism, intense commercialism, and the erosion of media ethics. The lessons for the rest of the free world could be neither more profound nor more relevant. Now is the time to understand Japan and its media atrocities.

Edition details

• Publisher: Regnery
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0895260468
• ISBN 13: 9780895260468
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464