Want to know what just happened in Japan or areas that Japan cares about? Well if you can read Japanese fragment sentences, the best free place to turn is probably Sankei Breaking News. I bet you didn’t know that eel prices are up 20% on low catches of sardines and fewer imports from China, did you?
Only thing is you actually have to load the site to see it. That is so 2003!
Hell yeah. I’m sick of relying on the leftie loonies at Asahi only because they have the best RSS feeds. C’mon Sankei, you’re killing me here!
The problem, of course, is that it is the Sankei. The “Fair and Balanced” news of Japan.
Oh please, Bryce. Fox News is no less shitty than the New York Times when it comes to point of view, they just take a different side. (Speaking of which, I was just saying this at Marmot — why does everyone put East Asian politics in an American frame of reference? It’s entirely nonsensical.)
Going back to the topic at hand, have you ever compared the Sankei and the Asahi? The Asahi just moans and bitches, at least the Sankei keeps a wry sense of humor and is fun to read.
Just make your own feed of the site with http://www.feedyes.com/ or http://feed43.com/ and life will be good.
You can’t seriously be comparing the New York Times and Fox News. The NYT, like serious American newspapers on either end of the political spectrum works to keep opinion and editorializing separate from actual reporting and analysis, whereas Fox News is pretty much all opinion and editorializing, peppered with items of “breaking news” mainly culled from reporting actually done by real news organizations and then read by their talking head anchors. Of course, this is the same formula used by all the cable news networks, but only Fox aims for such a clear ideological position.
But if you DO need an American frame of reference, Sankei is far more like the Wall Street Journal than it is like Fox News.
Looks like FeedYes can’t do it but Feed43 can. Here’s my first attempt:
http://feed43.com/1261726456411603.xml
BTW, that feed above will unfortunately only update every 6 hours. OK for most sites but obviously not those with very frequent updates like Sankei Sokuhou. You need to pay $29/yr for an account that provides hourly updates.
MF: First: the Sankei and the WSJ? If anything, the Sankei’s tone is closer to the NY Post… OK, a stretch, but it is nothing like the Wall Street Journal. Despite it’s name, it covers little economics and business news. If anything, Japan’s WSJ is the Nikkei, although the Nikkei doesn’t have a feisty partisan editorial page.
Next point: NYT and Fox cannot really be compared because the medium is different. And I don’t listen to or read either. But say what you will, at least Fox is “honest,” i.e. that whole “fair and balanced” is essentially tongue-in-cheek and only believed by the “true believers.” The bias in the NY Times is more insidious because it seeps into everything and yet they pretend it doesn’t exist. Speaking of which, the best excoriation of the NYT bias is done at Slate.com — not exactly a conservative news source.
Final point: Fox news isn’t nearly as biased as the BBC.
OK, the WSJ really is more like the Nikkei, I’ll have to give you that. But the NY Post? That’s such a crappy tabloid it could practically be British!
NHK World has RSS but I have never tried it, let me know if you think it is working or not:
http://www.nhk.or.jp/english/index.html
Curzon, good to see that there is a debate about BBC. I’m sure you have heard of “Outfoxed”, about Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, and how they “have been running a race to the bottom in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know.” http://www.outfoxed.org/
Curzon,
For someone who criticises others’ off-the-cuff remarks for placing East Asian politics in an American frame of reference, you shown have an unusual tendency to use that frame of reference to outline your own thoughts on the matter.
Bryce: Independently I am loathe to do it, but when people call the Sankei Fox and the WSJ, the lowest common denominator rule of rhetoric forces my hand.
Martin: calling Fox a biased gig is shooting fish in a barrel. Yeah, it’s very opinionated news. And very conservative and Republican. And the sky is blue. The difference: you know what you’re getting, besides the “fair and balanced” tag. The nature of bias in operations like the NY Times and the BBC is hidden and insidious, thus making it far more sinister.
Liberal news sources and news sources sympathetic to the liberal viewpoint can be great. The WaPo is my favorite daily newspaper in the US. Slate.com has the best journalism in the English language today — but neither make pretenses of covering its moderate, ever-so-slightly liberalism. The NY Times is very left wing and pretends to be the paper of record without fear or favor. Puh-leeeeze
Despite popular belief, the NYT has never actually called itself the “paper of record.” It has always been an external label. They may ACT that way, but it’s an important distinction between using the label and not.
And perhaps the fact that it is a widely propogated external label indicates that it accords with the views of so many, and is hence more representative of the mainstream. If “left” and “right” are relative depending on the time and place you find yourself in, perhaps the Times does have good claim to being “the paper of record.”