Who Pays the Price for TV Rage Bait? Thoughts on Provocative Comments by a Celebrity with Foreign Roots

I was watching television with my wife when a female celebrity—a former model with roots in a neighboring country—appeared on the screen. I immediately changed the channel.

My wife said, “I don’t really like her either.”

Neither do I.

The reason is simple: she repeatedly criticizes Japanese society in extremely harsh terms.

To be honest, part of me wonders why anyone would choose to remain in a country they seem to dislike so much.

That does not mean I believe foreigners living in Japan should never criticize the country. Japanese people complain about the Japanese government, Japanese companies, and Japanese society every day. It would be absurd to tell foreigners that they must remain silent and praise Japan simply because they have been allowed to live here.

At the very least, if you pay taxes, you have earned the right to complain.

What concerns me is something else: television turns the act of irritating people into a product.

Being Disliked Is Not Necessarily a Failure on Television

In an ordinary business, being disliked by your customers is a problem.

Media works a little differently.

“I like that person” produces engagement, but so does “Look what that person said again.”

The mechanism is even more obvious on social media.

An angry viewer shares the video. Someone leaves a critical comment. Another person responds. Then someone argues with that response.

Views and impressions rise as a result.

Liking and disliking are opposite emotions, but the media business converts both into the same metric: attention.

That is why television and online media always seem to have a certain number of designated villains.

They make viewers slightly angry. People talk about them online. News sites publish articles the next day. The argument continues on social media.

From a producer’s perspective, such personalities are extremely useful.

The old saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity has become even more powerful in the age of algorithms.

Television Has Always Had People Audiences Love to Hate

This business model is not new.

Television has long featured personalities who built careers on making cutting remarks.

They deliberately say rude things. They anger other guests. They make viewers uncomfortable. The provocation itself becomes their act.

Some of these personalities later moved to YouTube after appearing less frequently on television and once again attracted enormous numbers of views.

The platform changed from television to YouTube, but the business model remained largely the same.

If you provoke an emotional reaction, you win.

You can make people happy. You can move them. You can also make them angry.

From the perspective of an advertising business, anger is a perfectly marketable product.

Casting a Celebrity with Foreign Roots as the Villain Creates a Different Risk

The situation becomes more complicated when the celebrity has roots in another country.

When a Japanese celebrity makes offensive remarks, the reaction often ends with, “I don’t like that person.”

But when someone with foreign roots repeatedly says things such as “This is what is wrong with Japan” or “This is what Japanese people do badly,” some viewers do not keep their reaction focused on the individual.

“I don’t like that person” becomes “There is another foreigner criticizing Japan.”

From there, it can turn into a careless generalization: “People from that country do nothing but complain about Japan.”

That is the frightening part.

A television network casts one person as a source of controversy and earns ratings from the outrage. The celebrity may understand, at least to some extent, that being disliked is part of the role.

But the bill for that resentment does not necessarily go only to the celebrity.

It can be passed on to completely unrelated people from the same country who are simply working and living ordinary lives in Japan.

They said nothing, yet they may be viewed as if they secretly hate Japan or should leave if they dislike it so much.

That is an extraordinarily unfair price for them to pay.

A Character Created by Television Is Not a Representative of an Entire Nationality

Foreign residents who appear on television obviously do not represent the average foreign resident in Japan.

Television is not looking for people who say ordinary things in an ordinary way. It is looking for people who are useful to a program.

They make forceful statements. They have a distinctive character. They divide opinion. Their remarks can be clipped into attention-grabbing headlines.

Those are the people most likely to be selected.

This is not unique to foreigners. The same principle applies to political and economic commentators.

A person who answers every question with “It depends on the circumstances” is less useful to television than someone willing to declare, “Japan is finished!”

Viewers should therefore never look at a foreigner on television and conclude, “So this is what foreigners think.”

That person is not a representative of foreigners.

They are a representative selected by television.

Those are two entirely different things.

The Moment I Became Angry, I May Have Given the Program Exactly What It Wanted

This time, I reacted exactly as expected.

She appeared on the screen. I recognized her immediately. Then I changed the channel.

When I think about it, the fact that I remembered her may already count as a victory for the strategy.

Sometimes I see a well-liked celebrity and think, “Who was that again?”

Strangely, the faces and names of people I dislike often remain much clearer in my memory.

That is the power of rage bait.

Human attention is captured not only by what we like, but also by what we dislike. Today’s media understands that tendency very well.

But I do not have to participate.

If something is unpleasant, I can stop watching. I do not have to post angrily about it on social media. I do not have to watch clipped videos or search for the person’s name just to make myself even angrier.

The least dramatic—and probably most effective—response to rage bait is to ignore it.

Do not give it your anger. More importantly, do not give it your numbers.

Of course, I changed the channel and then wrote an entire blog post about the incident.

Perhaps I am the person who took the bait most completely after all.