This essay examines how television framing elevates selected figures as authorities, revealing a media culture unchanged since past fabrication scandals and still intent on shaping public opinion through distortion.

2016-03-18

Last night—if I recall correctly, it was MS News—an article appeared about a certain Kawakami who had served as a commentator on 報道ステーション. It was nothing more than a laughable story.

By placing such a person at the center of the screen as if he were an authority, TV Asahi—that is, Asahi Shimbun—was publicly proving that the same fabricating mentality that produced the so-called wartime comfort women reporting remains intact to this day, unchanged in any respect.

In other words, if a person happens to align with their distorted ideology, they will elevate him—even someone like Seiji Yoshida, a man who seemed born to tell lies—thereby pleasing South Korea and China while gravely damaging the honor and credibility of Japan and its people.

It is pathetic enough that a television network would decide to appoint such a person as the anchor of a new program merely because Asahi had favored him. But the Japanese people should burn this reality into their memories so that they are never again made to dance to their tune.

The company executive mentioned today remarked about 報道ステーション, “There’s nothing else to watch in that time slot.”

Looking at this morning’s program listings, anyone with a sound mind must have been utterly appalled by the distorted, childish, and malicious intent of the Asahi Shimbun.

Those who have long insisted that Japan should “learn from Germany” are, plainly speaking, agents of the South Korean government and the Korean CIA—calling them spies would not be an exaggeration. Asahi has continued to support them. A truly frightening newspaper.

The title currently being broadcast—“Lessons of the Weimar Constitution: Why Dictatorship Emerged in Germany”—is a project imbued with the most childish and malicious intent imaginable, aimed at shaping public opinion as if the Abe administration were trying to establish a dictatorship.

I find it impossible to believe that Japanese people would conceive such a project. Recently, Ichiro Furutachi casually introduced, and even put on screen, the fact that the foreign affairs desk chief at TV Asahi bears a Korean name.

A newspaper that has spread, as major scoops, the anti-Japan propaganda of China—a one-party communist dictatorship—while saying nothing domestically or internationally about that regime’s own dictatorship, has no standing whatsoever to lecture others.

The number of Japanese citizens who think this way has now become overwhelming. The only ones who do not realize it are they themselves.

Even now, they labor under the delusion that they represent Japan.

Few people are as foolish and grotesque as this.