Recovery in Japan - Where Is the Media?

How well is the recovery effort in Japan going? During the days and weeks immediately following the earthquake, tsunami, and resulting nuclear power station problems, newspapers and television networks around the world informed the public with a constant stream of status reports. As time passed, these reports disappeared, to be replaced by new hot stories. The news media think the public requires novelty in the news. Ongoing situations do not receive the attention they deserve. Instead, we focus on the disaster, military action, or political scandal of the current day or week. That's also why good news is seldom reported. Good news tends to be ongoing and background information rather than a spectacular event (except for the occasional royal wedding). The other peculiar habit of the news media is that they highlight one to five major events on any particular day, when there are many more newsworthy events happening in the world. Perhaps this will be one of the nails in the coffins of newspapers and television news. They are limited by column space or scheduled time. Internet news is expandable without confines. A web page can either scroll indefinitely or reference links to cover every worthwhile story that is happening anywhere. Now if they paid appropriate royalties to all their copied sources, they'd have a truly superior news presentation system.