Fukushima's Radiant Media Junket

(click for full size)

Oh, are there photos from yesterday’s Fukushima media junket orchestrated by TEPCO and the Japanese Government. (The NYT ran 14 pics, The Daily Mail used 18, CBS ran 31.) AP photographer David Guttenfelder, the only American of the fifty journalist on the trip, filed this report of the shoot for the MSNBC Photoblog. For my money, though, this is the only photo that really tells the story.

In spite (or maybe even because) of the troubling disclosure a week-and-a-half ago that the plant is experiencing bursts of fission after three of the reactors melted down (news of which, Japan stonewalled), TEPCO has scored a major PR coup blanketing visual media with images consisting primarily of workers going through layers and layers of safety procedures. Given Tepco and Japan’s persistent efforts to spin and contain this story, it’s hard for me to look past the metaphor here of journalists, bottled up to fend off the microsieverts, being taken for a ride.

And then, just to “amplify the theme,” how about this tour shot of the plastic-wrapped megaphone?

Bag’s Fukushima coverage here.

(photos: David Guttenfelder/AP/Pool. caption 1: An official from the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), wearing a protective suit and mask, uses a plastic-covered megaphone to speak to fellow TEPCO workers and journalists as they drive towards the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station in Okuma on November 12, 2011. caption 2: An official from the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), wearing a protective suit and mask, uses a plastic-covered megaphone to speak to fellow TEPCO workers and journalists as they drive towards the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station in Okuma on November 12, 2011.