Hitting bottom

I've seen little point in blathering about Japan. Anything I might say would be redundant, reductive or derivative.

Until now.

Certain aspects of the wall-to-wall media hysteria did have me wondering if predictions of the impending nuclear apocalypse were over-hyped. Now that the crisis seems to be have been rationalised, with nuclear genie back in the bottle, a little hindsight clearly shows that the western media seems to have performed as expected: woefully. From a TPM reader and putative "student of Japan":

"Of course fear sells newspapers, but in unfortunate cases, the coverage is rooted in long-standing prejudices held by some Westerners against the non-West: for instance, a superiority complex that feels only the West and its media have real access to the truth, which led to a downplaying of Japanese media reports. In the worst cases, there has been simple racism, as some reporters when viewing how calm the Japanese are, seem to think the Japanese are mere robots who cannot grasp the immensity of the crisis or, as one colleague reports when a Spanish reporter interviewed her, think that the Japanese are genetically tuned to accept disaster. It is ironic that such reports assume such an attitude when, at the same time through their own inaccuracies, they show how much better the Japanese coverage is."