2021.5.28

     Only half of the students attended today’s class due to distributed school attendance. I was very lucky for being able to take today's class as it was shocking to know the relationship between judiciary, media, and company.

     The first work was to check 3 major newspaper company in the US, which is NewYork Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. What I learned from reading these is that these reports are clearly tilted toward Chevron, the company that is responsible for oil pollution in Ecuador. Chevron pays a huge amount of advertisement fees to the media, I feel it becomes even complicated and unfair when one side has too much power that they can even control the public general’s opinion using biased sentences. It was shocking that these famous three companies were criminalizing individuals and spreading fake information as if it’s nothing although Steven Donziger was trying to make the company compensate for their act.

     The second work was to compare these 3 reports with other media. The interesting finding was that minor companies such as RollingStone, THE HILL, and THE NEW YORK LAW JOURNAL were telling truth. For Japan, there was almost no information about the case. The websites that picked up the news were unreliable blogs done by individuals.

     Lastly, I could understand how companies and the judiciary can connect, as well as how Chevron ended up maximizing the suffering of the average citizens. I felt like this incident is similar to the Minamata case in Kumamoto Japan.