The Sky Is Falling and other US Media Myths

FOX News apparently thinks there is a nuclear power plant located in Shibuya, Tokyo, called Shibuya Eggman. Shibuya Eggman is, in fact, a nightclub in Shibuya.

So, there has been a lot of concerns and questions that everyone has been voicing over us going to Japan, and whether we'll turn green and rip our shirts off when we get angry when we come back, etc. This is actually rather understandable, since there is a whole host of news stories and reports from many places all talking about the impending nuclear doom that is going to befall the world. While I am certainly not one to downplay the very real dangers of nuclear fallout, there are a few things I would like to say about all of this:

• News everywhere is filtered and censored depending on what the powers that control that news would like to focus on in their reporting. This is why you have so many conflicting reports coming out, especially revolving around what is "actually" happening in Fukushima. This goes for both ends of the spectrum, though the sensationalist spectrum is one hell of a lot larger than the other side.

"High radiation!!" How much? "We don't know!!" They never wrote how much. The answer? 0.17 millisieverts per hour. How much is that? A normal chest x-ray is 0.2 millisieverts. Good news? No, normal levels are less than 1/10 that. It's a problem. Good headline? Absolutely.

• Western news always feels a need to somehow connect news to us. "There's a nuclear plant melting down in Japan: How does it affect your health? More at 10". We have people on the west coast buying up iodine tablets and causing shortages on medicine that could be sent to the people ACTUALLY LIVING IN THE DISASTER ZONE because of stories they heard on their "trusted" cable news channels. They have even gone so far as to explain how, if everything works out just right, we can see elevated radiation levels IN THE MIDWEST from all of this. Of course, it is a worst case scenario with all the winds lining up just right, the moon in the seventh house and the end result would be levels elevated so slightly that we would receive more radiation from flying to LA, but don't let that ruin a good headline. As a result, people were demanding the US evacuate Japan.

Evacuation! Wow, the US is evacuating Japan!

Oh wait....they're evacuating the area around the damaged plant.

• Still, they are flying people out that want out. The reactor is a problem, and for the people in that area, it is a big problem. For the city of Tokyo, it is an electrical supply problem on a large scale. But taken in context with everything that is happening and that has happened, the 380,000 now homeless people living in shelters with no heat in sub-freezing temperatures with fast dwindling food and water supplies: THAT is the real problem, and the one that should be leading the headlining every day. There have been some CNN human interest stories with the requisite crying elderly person staring at their ruined home, but the focus is being taken away from the many, many people who really ARE suffering right now. It's not an eye-catching story that pundits can tie their political views to, though, so it's taking a back seat in many places.

Refugee shelter. There's 2,400 of them in the Tohoku region, currently.

• All my ranting aside, there has been some very good reporting by NPR and the BBC and even CNN (Anderson Cooper, when he's not filming sobbing former homeowners, has been talking to a lot of people up there), complete with pesky facts and all that. NHK, Japan's public media, has been very good at not sensationalizing, almost to a fault. They don't want to panic the population, because that would help no one, and they don't report anything that hasn't been verified, which can take time. As a result, they are probably a little more conservative in their description of the reactor story than they should be, downplaying some dangers that really are there. Couple that with the Japanese power company's spin being the main source of information (until today, when US drone planes got to get some very good shots of the plant), it's been a tug of war to determine what the real truth is.

There is some good news, however. Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the owners of the plant, successfully reconnected the electricity and are attempting to get the cooling systems back online. If that happens, much of the disaster could be averted. Then maybe they can all start focusing on the poor people in Tohoku and recovery.

Some good news links:
NHK World News (In English)
The Japan Times
The BBC
 NPR <-- Even THEY have a headline "Radiation: Is US at Risk?"