The right-wing media and politicians have turned up the volume of their attack on the Asahi Shimbun after the newspaper retracted and apologized for past articles on the "comfort women" and for reports on the testimonies of Masao Yoshida, the late chief of Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant at the time of the March 2011 meltdown disaster.
The current situation poses a problem that not only concerns a single newspaper publisher but also could greatly affect the future of political discussion and even the direction of democratic politics in this country.
It is natural for newspapers, with their mission of reporting facts as news, to make corrections and apologize when they have published erroneous reports. Still, the way the Yomiuri and Sankei dailies have ganged up against Asahi — to be honest — is quite extraordinary.