Japanese Media Disdain of Religions?

This is a continuation from yesterday's entry.

Apparently, religion is almost absent from the public sphere, partly due to antagonism toward religion among journalists, and partly due to a general timidity among religious groups of media exposure.

As Helen Hardacre pointed out, in much of the developed world, the relation between the media and religion is generally positive. But in the case of Japan, coverage of religion in the media is limited and in the case of new religious movements, generally negative.

Indeed, according to Muro Tadashi, traditional print and broadcast media in Japan even maintained an informal taboo on reporting good news about religion or even legal verdicts favorable to religion.

How come? It seems that at the end of the 19th century, new religious movements first appeared in the pages of Japanese newspapers as material for scandalous articles. The religion Renmonkyo was said to have been destroyed by one such attack in the 1890s, and other religions such as Tenrikyo and Hito no Michi were badly damaged by press campaigns that gave them no chance to respond.

Hardacre explained was that when newspapers were first expanding to achieve nationwide readership, sensationalist exposes of religion were used to boost circulation (hmm, has a familiar modern day twist to it), as well as to present the media as the champions of science, medicine, rationality, and modernity.

Hardacre added: "Journalists constructed religion as a straw man representing the opposite qualities of superstition, irrationality, and opposition to modernity. At this first, early stage, religion had neither effective access to media nor media of its own, so it was unable to defend itself, or to influence the terms of its relations with (the) media."

But how come things did not change much even after religious groups began to create their own media outlets to get their point of views across?