Japan’s powerful media hold key for new PM
JAPAN: Japan’s new Prime Minister Naoto Kan will have to keep
the country’s powerful media on side if he wants to escape the fate of
many of his predecessors and see out more than a year in office.
Kan was elevated to the role after Yukio Hatoyama resigned last week
the fourth premier in as many years to leave under a cloud over money
scandals and a dispute about a US airbase that saw him cave in to
Washington’s demands and renege on an election pledge.
Breaking with convention, Hatoyama did not give a final press
conference. After answering reporters’ questions almost every morning
and afternoon of his nine-month stint in office, he may have had enough
of journalists.
In his final doorstep interview, less than a year after a sweeping
electoral victory, the centre-left leader said in a trembling voice:
“The Japanese public no longer listens to the voice of my
administration.”
A barrage of voter polls by newspapers, TV networks and news agencies
in Japan’s highly competitive media landscape had relentlessly charted
his decline from sky-high approval ratings in excess of 70 percent after
his election win to the nadir of 17 percent last week.
Most observers agree that the scholarly and often aloof political
blue-blood had dug his own grave, especially by mishandling the row over
the US base on Okinawa island and by baffling voters with his often
abstract statements.
But many political experts also consider the Japanese media an
increasingly tough audience which allows politicians ever shorter
honeymoons, quickly seizes on ‘verbal gaffes’, and is happy to speculate
on when premiers will resign until the media chorus can become a
self-fulfilling prophesy.
“When media polls go into a downward spiral on a national leader, he
gets trapped and cannot get out of it,” said politics professor Tomoaki
Iwai of Nihon University.
In Hatoyama’s case, “major media obviously shifted their editorial
tone against Hatoyama in the spring,” said Sadafumi Kawato, professor of
politics at Tokyo University.
“They kept implying his inevitable resignation and influencing public
opinion through polls.”
Muneyuki Shindo, professor of political science at Chiba University,
said Japanese media were “impatient” and aggressively searched for
faults as soon as Hatoyama took office, having ended a half a century of
conservative rule.
Tokyo, Monday, AFP |