Progress report on The Asahi Shimbun's coverage of Yoshida testimony

The Asahi Shimbun has conducted an in-house inquiry to determine why the article that reported the "Yoshida testimony" erroneously said that plant workers went against the order of plant manager Masao Yoshida and withdrew to the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear plant.

Through our investigation, we have concluded that our reporters failed to conduct sufficient news-gathering and missed elements in the testimony that should have been mentioned in the article. We conclude that those failures led to the erroneous report.

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■Why the article falsely reported workers 'withdrew against Yoshida's order?'

■Insufficient confirmation of whether 'order' transmitted to plant workers

■News-gathering was done by small number of reporters without cross-checking

Referring to plant manager Masao Yoshida's instructions on evacuation, The Asahi Shimbun used the word "order" and wrote an article that said the workers "withdrew against the order."

For that article, the Asahi's news-gathering was insufficient, for example, the newspaper was unable to confirm whether his order reached many workers in a chaotic situation following the nuclear accident.

As a result, the article wrongly stated that "90 percent of the workers went against Yoshida's order and withdrew to the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear plant."

Our investigation team, mainly comprising reporters from the Investigative Reporting Section of the Tokyo Head Office's News Division, examined the content of newly obtained Yoshida testimony and paid attention to developments on the morning of March 15, 2011, when the No. 2 reactor fell into a critical condition.

Regarding the fact that many plant workers moved to the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant, the team judged that the workers "went against Yoshida's order."

The judgement was based mainly on three factors: Yoshida's testimony; chronological data in Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s internal documents obtained from a number of sources; and records of news conferences by TEPCO at its head office.

In his testimony, Yoshida said workers moved to the No. 2 plant although he meant to tell them to stay near the No. 1 plant and await further instructions. The chronological data contains contents that showed Yoshida ordered workers to stay.

During a news conference, TEPCO officials announced that workers had begun moving to safer locations on the compounds of the No. 1 plant. However, 90 percent of the workers moved to the No. 2 plant at around the same time.

In preparing to issue the article reporting that "workers went against the order and withdrew to the No. 2 plant" on the Asahi's morning edition on May 20, 2014, our reporters who are well familiar with the issue read the story before publication. Some pointed out that it was too strong to use expressions, such as "order" and "went against."

But in order to protect the sources of the information, news-gathering was limited to a small team of reporters. As a result, there was not a sufficient number of reporters to corroborate information and there was a failure in the function of confirming the news-gathering situation.

An editorial meeting on the day when the newspaper decided to publish the article failed to check the contents.

After the Asahi published the article, the investigation team obtained testimony that many workers were not informed of Yoshida's statement "to stay near the No. 1 plant and wait for further instructions" in the chaotic situation.

One middle-ranking worker told the Asahi that he got on a bus after being told by his boss that they were moving to the No. 2 plant.

He did not directly hear Yoshida's instruction because he was not in the rooms equipped with teleconference systems. He said he had heard the previous night that workers would move to the No. 2 plant, and he simply thought this instruction was still valid.

TEPCO President Naomi Hirose also testified in the Diet that the company was also considering the No. 2 plant as a candidate site for evacuation orders issued to workers.

At the time the article was written, the investigation team had not obtained sufficient confirmation on the matter from the workers.

As a result, the team failed to comprehend the fact that workers evacuated to the No. 2 plant while they were not properly informed about the instruction.

Meanwhile, regarding the fact that plant workers moved to Fukushima No. 2 plant, Yoshida said in his testimony that workers "evacuated" and never used the term "withdrawing."

If workers had moved to a safer site within the No. 1 plant, they can return to their posts immediately.

But the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant is about 10 kilometers away, and the roads were damaged by the quake, meaning they would have been unable to promptly return to their posts at the No. 1 plant once they moved to the No. 2 plant.

Regarding the situation in which most of the workers who moved to the No. 2 plant were unable to return in a short period of time, the team described the evacuation as "withdrawing."

However, because the article said the workers "went against Yoshida's order" and "withdrew" from the No. 1 plant, it ended up giving readers the strong impression that the workers fled while knowing about the "order."

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■Why did the article drop parts of testimony?

■Reporters misjudged as 'unnecessary impression felt later'

The article did not contain the part where plant manager Masao Yoshida said he valued the workers' act of taking shelter at the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant as "by far the right thing" to do. It also excluded the part where he recognized that his instruction failed to be conveyed to many workers because it had become a "telephone game."

Despite those remarks of Yoshida, our reporters failed to conduct necessary news-gathering, such as interviewing the workers, before writing that they "went against the order."

As for his "right" remark, the investigation team thought that Yoshida was simply giving his later impression of the workers' actions and that the remark was not necessarily essential information.

They made a mistake in appraising the remark and neglected to give it sufficient consideration.

In the morning edition of May 20, the article carried Yoshida's testimony: "In fact, I never told the workers to go to the 2F (Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant). I thought I gave an order to temporarily evacuate to a location where radiation levels were low near the Fukushima No. 1 plant, irrespective of whether it is in the compound of the plant, and await further instructions. But after the workers arrived at the No. 2 plant, I contacted them and asked that the group managers be the first to return."

However, after the sentence "I never told the workers to go to the 2F," the original text of the testimony contained the remark: "This is the typical stuff with relayed messages. We were discussing, 'Should we head for 2F if we are ever going?' I said, 'Take shelter, get automobiles.' And somebody who relayed my message told the drivers to go to the Fukushima No. 2 plant."

Furthermore, the remark: "I came to believe that going to 2F was by far the right thing to do if only you gave more thought to it" was not included in the article.

Although the remarks were carried in the digital version, they should have also been carried in the paper version.

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■Why was there a delay in retracting the article?

■Reporting by other media did not immediately change thinking

Soon after The Asahi Shimbun published articles about the Yoshida testimony, criticism appeared in Internet blogs and weekly magazines, with journalists saying "the report is wrong" and "it demeans workers who were risking their lives."

Those in charge in the news and editing divisions received reports from the investigation team which said there was no mistake in the order given by "plant manager Masao Yoshida to await further instructions within the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant site so the workers could immediately return to their posts."

The decision was made that there was no error in the contents of the article based on two factors: 1) the articles were written by reporters with a track record in covering past nuclear accidents; and 2) those criticizing the articles likely did not possess the entire Yoshida testimony document.

Measures were also put in place to lodge a protest if the need arose. At that stage, no investigation had started within the Asahi.

On a number of occasions, discussions were held within the Asahi, including with the team, about publishing articles to respond to the criticism. But the situation never reached the level of actually publishing such articles.

On Aug. 18, The Sankei Shimbun published an article saying it had obtained a copy of the Yoshida testimony. Various other media organizations subsequently began running articles about obtaining the Yoshida testimony. The contents of those articles highlighted the fact that Yoshida's testimony expressed the recognition that while the evacuation to the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant was different from his original intent, it turned out to have been the correct move. Those articles gave a different impression from the ones that appeared in the Asahi.

Even at that stage, the judgment was made that the evacuation of plant workers to the Fukushima No. 2 plant could be interpreted on the surface as "withdrawing against an order" because other existing materials, such as internal Tokyo Electric Power Co. documents, corroborated the "order."

Doubts began to be raised not only by the media but also by readers. In late August, senior editors instructed the news and editing divisions to check the contents of the Yoshida testimony. The reason was that only a small number of reporters had actually read the testimony because of the stance of maintaining the confidentiality of the information sources.

A small number of individuals in the news and editing divisions who were not on the original team were placed in charge of this matter. They compared the contents of the Yoshida testimony with objective documents and looked into the various issues. They maintained the thinking that "the interpretation can be made that acts went against orders" because there were no errors in the surface facts.

However, an analysis was undertaken of the testimony of plant workers and others obtained through additional news-gathering while discussions were held with the initial team and other reporters involved in the matter.

As a result, it was learned that 1) the expression "90 percent of plant workers withdrew against the order," used in the headline and which was related to the core part of the article, was an error; and 2) contents of the Yoshida testimony that should have been included in the original article were dropped.

The judgment was made that the article lacked proper corroboration.

Given such factors as the shaking of the core part of the article, the conclusion was reached that the understanding of readers could not be obtained through only a correction of wording. The judgment was made to take the more serious move of "retracting" the article rather than simply correcting it.