A long time ago, when print newspapers were still relevant, I subscribed to a paper called "The Daily Yomiuri." This was the English equivalent of the far more popular "Yomiuri Shimbun". I chose this paper not because it was the best, but because it was the cheapest and news in English was hard to come by in the pre-internet days.
One of the things that started happening in this magazine was that they started printing letters and editorials by someone who went by the name "Roy MacGregor Hastings" (or "Hasty" - my memory is a little fuzzy). I'm pretty sure this was a fake name and that the articles and letters were just as fake. Each one was full of nasty, bizarre stereotypes about Americans. One of the more memorable ones talked about how they'd weep into the vegetarian dish cloths while eating their brown rice or some such odd talk. These days, I'm sure that this creature would write about being fat, owning guns, and eating junk food.
At any rate, this was my introduction to something that I saw the English press in Japan do on occasion which irritated me greatly. That's okay because their intention was to piss me and other readers off. I think that some of them intentionally baited the foreign community to get them more engaged with these small circulation publications in an effort to improve sales or, at the very least, inspire enough passion to get more letters. While my most memorable experience with this was with the Daily Yomiuri (and I got so sick of it happening that I canceled my subscription and swapped to "The Asahi Evening News"), I saw it happening in other publications as well.
These days, it tends to happen more online than anywhere else. In fact, it happened to me with one of my former blogs in which a content aggregator (the bottom feeders of the blogging world) pitted something I wrote against a reply someone else wrote. The main problem was that they outright lied and distorted everything I said in my post to ramp up the potential conflict. A plethora of comments put me down while just one person who had actual reading comprehension said, "this is NOT what she said!"
I don't miss this way of baiting the foreign community by planting (almost certainly fake) incendiary stories in order to rile people up. It was and is a cheap way of getting readers and attention and it fractures a community that desperately needs to offer its members more support.
Posts
