How the New Yorker Fell into the “Weird Japan” Trap
There are too many myths peddled about Japan, internally and externally, to list here, and the article provides just one more example. It&#x27;s not just the media&#x27;s desire to draw wide ranging conclusions from specific, interesting stories, but also due to Japanese culture itself, a culture of putting appearances before truth, conveniently wrapped up in the (ironically) anodyne phrase &quot;don&#x27;t disturb the <i>wa</i>&quot;. One dangerous example being the distortion of the truth about COVID-19 spread in the run up to the Olympics. I expect the same over the next few months.<p>As to the larger picture though, I&#x27;m not sure why anyone trusts journalists nowadays. In an age of greater access to information their previous stranglehold on &quot;the truth&quot; has repeatedly been shown to be a sham and trusting factcheckers seems to be repeating exactly the same mistake over again but with added naïveté - &quot;Oh, they&#x27;re <i>factcheckers</i>, that must be true! Giving them that title immediately renders these humans incapable of bias…&quot;. The article even wants us to continue to swallow the blatant lie that some reasonably large proportion of stories go through a &quot;rigorous fact-checking process&quot; and even then couldn&#x27;t withstand lies from sources. <i>Please</i>, you may as well tell me Santa is really going to drop off my presents this year, which would nice given the chaos at ports (thanks again, COVID-19 and lies about contagion).<p>The &quot;age of big data&quot; and democratised access to data and communication (something that governments and media companies, old and new, have been seeking to reverse) has inadvertently created an &quot;age of epistemology&quot; for which most seem unprepared, journalists being among the least prepared.<p>I have precisely zero sympathy.