Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that led to the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
The media of both Japan and Australia marked the occasion with a veritable orgy of fear-mongering and exaggeration, plus a fair dollop of outright lies.
The Sydney Morning Herald led the way with this quite extraordinarily disingenous piece by Helen Caldicott. She got quite carried away about the forthcoming cancers at Fukushima, without even mentioning the recent WHO report which stated that ... there probably won't be any.
The Japan Times made only the slightest effort at balance. There were articles about families living in substandard housing after fleeing the radiation, the dubious links the Nuclear Regulation Authority has to the nuclear industry, and of anti-nuclear rallies all around the nation. Worst of all, there was a dreadful (and, I suspect, almost completely fabricated) propaganda piece about an accident at the Byron nuclear plant in Illnois. Among other outright lies it contained the claim that the accident resulted in several deaths and illnesses. In actuality, there have been no fatalities caused by radiation in the American nuclear power industry since its inception 60 years ago.
Hardly noticeable among all the negativity was a short piece reporting that radiation levels around Fukushima have dropped by half in the last year...
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