* This essay column is written by a longtime foreign resident of Japan.

My poor heart is broken. It lies in a thousand pieces at my feet. I have been deceived, betrayed, cheated.

I know I was wrong to be so trusting, but we had been together so many years and been through so much together: wars, earthquakes, the rise and fall of world leaders, the end of eras and even the passing of a millennium.

Of course it was only a business relationship: I paid and was provided with a service in return, but sometimes it felt like something more.

After all these years, how could you mislead me? How could you be untrue? How could you betray my trust?

How could my newspaper lie to me?

I've always believed -- perhaps naively -- that if I read something in a newspaper it must be true. Oh, I know that government ministries and agencies plant and leak stories that they want in the press, and that advertisements frequently masquerade as news or feature stories. Perhaps when it comes to the popular press -- the tabloids, the "sports" newspapers, some of the more salacious weekly magazines that seem to spend all their time camped outside love hotels waiting for celebrities to fall from grace -- the only healthy attitude is to regard it as a source of fictional entertainment, to be enjoyed but not necessarily believed.

But my newspaper is a "quality" daily -- at least that's what it claims -- and I depend on it for reliable information.

I speak little Japanese and read even less, so every morning I buy an English-language newspaper on my way to work, and I subscribe to an English-language weekly magazine. I rely on them to provide me with analysis of, and comment on the stories that I may have seen on bilingual television newscasts or heard on American forces radio, as well as other information and, hopefully, some entertainment. And I can't afford 800 yen for a 4-day-old British newspaper that would cost the equivalent of 90 yen in England.

I know I could get more up to date and more comprehensive analysis and commentary on the Internet, but I don't have a computer or a keitei. And I'm pretty sure that reading my newspaper on the train to work is unlikely to endanger the life of anyone using a pacemaker or other medical device.

But last month one photograph destroyed my newspaper's credibility and soured my relationship of trust.

I was reading a news feature and I recognized a photograph. After some research on the Internet -- I do have a computer at work -- I found that the photo was not what it claimed to be. The people in the photo were not who the caption said they were, they were not where the caption said they were and they were not doing what the caption said they were doing. It wasn't a mistake. The people and action in the photo, and its location had been deliberately misidentified to fit the story, to mislead readers. Such dishonesty is obviously not confined to the newspaper I buy in Japan. The Los Angeles Times recently fired a photographer for digitally combining two separate photos to create a single, more stunning image from the war in Iraq.

And if one photograph isn't what it seems, what about all the others?

The people who put together the page in my paper may have thought they were being clever or "creative," but distorting the truth is neither. What angered me more than the lie was the arrogance behind it; the belief that it didn't matter because the readers would never know. In other words, I know more than you, I'm smarter than you. Well, not smart enough.

If you have any comments please e-mail me
at jtweekly@japantimes.co.jp .

The Japan Times Weekly: April 19, 2003
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