David McNeill: Who's telling the truth on the Fukushima meltdown?

A string of autopsies -- political, regulatory and technological -- loom over the corpse of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The media, however, has already begun its self-examination and it’s not a pretty picture.

Newsweek Japan is one of many publications that have criticized “sensationalist” foreign reporters, who “failed to accomplish their mission” during the disaster.

Newsweek says some journalists ran away and many of those who stayed massively overreacted to the threat from the crippled reactors.

Hyperventilating foreign hacks were an easy, and sometimes deserving, target.  Many observers recall CNN’s Jonathan Mann’s purple-veined report that radiation levels had increased to “10 million times” safe levels near the Fukushima plant, then ignoring a correction by operator TEPCO that knocked several zeroes off that estimate.

Missing words

But although Japanese newspapers and TV reporters mostly kept their heads, they also concealed or delayed releasing information about what was going on inside the Fukushima plant.

One of the more striking aspects of the local media coverage of Fukushima was the missing word -- “meltdown.” It seemed reasonable to speculate, from March 11-15, that this is precisely what happened. One reason was the repeated news of cesium dispersed in the atmosphere on March 12.

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