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Tracing Individual Perceptions of Media Credibility in Post-3.11 Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Sonja Petrovic
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Abstract

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The 3.11 disaster revealed many shortcomings in Japan’s mass media organisations and government, the most prominent arguably being the poor handling of the disaster by central government and TEPCO, including miscommunication and delays in releasing accurate data on the dispersal of radioactive materials. The lack of transparency in mass media coverage of the nuclear meltdown and levels of radiation resulted in growing distrust among the public, who turned to online sources and social media to confirm or challenge information provided by the mass media.

Based on in-depth interviews with 38 Japanese individuals, this study explores individual perceptions of media credibility in a disaster context and in the present, elaborating how changes in trust in media intersects with the changes and dynamics in media use and how the 3.11 disaster continues to influence media use and perceptions of credibility today. The main findings of the study suggest that in the wake of the unprecedented national disaster, Japanese media users moved from using traditional mass media as their sole source of news to a personalised, inter-media environment which integrates both online and traditional modes of communication without replacing traditional media players. This further facilitated the practice of seeking and evaluating information and media credibility through new media forms of connectivity such as social media platforms and news websites.

Keywords

3.11 disastercommunication gapinter-media environmentmass mediamedia credibilitysocial media
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 18 , Issue 10 , May 2020 , e3
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2020

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