ABSTRACT
Since returning to power in 2012, the administration of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and his Liberal Democratic Party stand accused of conducting a campaign aimed at curtailing press liberties and muting the voices of critical journalists – a process that Nakano Koichi described as an “emasculation” of the Japanese media (Harding 2015). However, while equating the actions of the Abe administration with castration makes for vivid copy, it probably overstates the differences between the powers of persuasion of the current administration and its predecessors as regards to press freedom. It furthermore elevates, without great reason, the protagonists of today, while ignoring the news elite’s habitudes of complicity in the destruction of their reportorial virility. It also exaggerates the damage inflicted, offering a confusing binomial sense of loss (Have v. Not Have) of the media’s powers.
