The Japanese media experienced a crisis in public confidence following the powerful 2011 earthquake that caused a tsunami and a nuclear plant catastrophe, a visiting scholar from Japan told Tsinghua University students on November 20.

Wataru Sawamura, a visiting scholar in Tsinghua School of Journalism and Communication, told undergraduate students in the English-language news class that the media has been criticized for being insufficiently skeptical of statements by government and corporate officials following the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, and for underreporting the health and safety risks for Japanese citizens.

Mr. Sawamura, a veteran reporter and editor at Asahi Shimbun, Japan's largest newspaper, said traditional media outlets sometimes struggled to compete with social media in the aftermath of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami that killed 18,535, permanently displaced 290,000 people and caused an estimated $250 billion in monetary damages. It was the nation's most deadly incident since the atomic explosions that ended the Second World War.

There also was a serious decline in trust in the media from 2011 to 2012, he said, citing a survey showing public confidence in the Japanese media declining from 53 percent to 38 percent. (Trust in the government and private corporations fell even more sharply.)

The crisis in confidence came at a particularly bad time for the media, he noted, coinciding with a decline in newspaper circulation and advertising revenue in Japan. The media learned some valuable lessons from the disaster, he said, including the need for better communication with frontline personnel handling the crisis, greater use more crowd sourcing to get information, retaining more in-house specialists in nuclear power and improving science literacy for non-science reporters.