According to this Alternet article about a new book (A Public Betrayed: An Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and Their Warnings to the West), Japan's MSM is the most mistrusted in the world. The thing is, it doesn't sound that structurally different in many ways from the U.S. MSM! :)

However, you'd expect a left-leaning U.S. website to say, that, wouldn't you?

Anyways, an excerpt:

In sum, as Gamble and Watanabe demonstrate, Japan has "the least independent, and arguably the least trustworthy, news media in the democratic world, whose transgressions could shock the most jaundiced American audience."

On the other hand, those transgressions may appear increasingly familiar to American audiences. After all, the Japanese system of media control, while pre-dating World War II, was not only left in place but strengthened after the War, when the United States occupied Japan, dictated its Constitution, and reorganized its society.

"After the American occupation, the same people controlled the media as before the War," Professor Watanabe said in an interview. "GHQ (General Headquarters, the American Command) used the pre-War media system to censor and control during the occupation, and then passed it on intact to the Japanese, and the same people took it over again. After the occupation, the Liberal Democratic Party came to power, supported by the CIA, where it remains today."

A soft system of censorship and control? A highly consolidated, vertically integrated oligopoly of ownership, coupled with a synergistic, symbiotic relationship with government? Government subsidized media as opinion-makers? Compliant, clubby corporate journalists who get along by going along, and exchange investigation and independence for access and success.

Sure sounds like atrocities to me. But at least it could never happen here?

Could it?