Prior to the recent retrial of a man who was eventually sentenced to death by the Hiroshima High Court for killing a woman and her 1-year-old child in 1999, the Broadcasting Ethics and Program Improvement Organization complained about the coverage of the case. The BPO said that media outlets concentrated on the story of Hiroshi Motomura, the husband of the murdered woman, to the exclusion of the defendant's story, thus producing an unbalanced view of the case so far.
After the sentencing, an unnamed TV news director explained to the Asahi Shimbun that while he understood the BPO's stance, the job of commercial broadcasters is to "describe human drama that viewers can appreciate." The grieving husband, who wanted the defendant to pay for his crime with his life even though he was a minor at the time of the killings, understood this dynamic and controlled the story by actively cultivating the media. Testimony showing how the defendant grew up in a violent household that drove his mother to suicide was mostly absent from coverage of the case, and one can assume that it was overlooked for the sake of Motomura, whom reporters openly admired for his dogged pursuit of a death sentence.
Controlling the story takes on a different meaning in another homocide case involving a minor. Psychiatrist Morimitsu Sakihama is now on trial for violating the Confidentiality Law by leaking information about a 17-year-old boy who started a fire that killed his stepmother and two siblings in Nara in 2006. Sakihama had tested the boy on behalf of the Nara Family Court, and because trials involving minors are closed to the public, his findings were confidential.