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The story
Actor and TOKIO member Masahiro Matsuoka spoke about the current state of TV compliance culture while appearing on TV Tokyo’s “Nikenme Dou Suru?” (“What Should We Do for Round Two?”). His comments — “what’s said on TV isn’t something you should take seriously” and “getting so worked up over it” — were widely reported, and the thread on 5ch’s Entertainment/Sports Breaking News+ board was split between support and criticism. TOKIO lost two members to scandals in quick succession — Tatsuya Yamaguchi in 2018 and Taichi Kokubun in 2024 — and the thread mixed sarcastic jabs like “does he even have the right to say this, given his own group’s track record” with agreement that “the point about viewers and social media reactions needing to be brushed off is actually fair.” The discussion spread into the public nature of the airwaves and the structure of sponsor-funded TV, with several commenters even questioning television’s reason for existing at all.
Masahiro Matsuoka addresses TV compliance: “What’s said on TV isn’t something you should take seriously”
Actor Masahiro Matsuoka appeared on the 9th on TV Tokyo’s “Nikenme Dou Suru? ~Tsumami no Hanashi~” (Fridays at 12:12 a.m.), where he spoke about the state of television these days.
The guest that day was TV personality Yu Teshima, who married in 2022 and had her first child in 2023.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
There are even cases where a show's name itself became synonymous with a fabricated-reporting scandal.
Gachinko Fight Club was the real deal.
Matsuoka, have you not noticed that yourself?
Obvious threats or insults are a different story, but when it's just criticism or commentary,
celebrities should brush that off too.
Getting angry and instantly calling it "slander" is a failure as a celebrity.
You're going to get praised sometimes and criticized other times —
if you can't handle that, you shouldn't be a celebrity.
You just want it easy, don't you.
Taken to the extreme, that could be read as saying anything goes on public airwaves.
Do you have any idea how long TV's been everywhere, since the Showa era?
Lies.
Fabrication.
Low-class behavior.
Offensiveness.
Cruelty.
Maybe shows just can't get made anymore without that stuff.
Funny how forgiving Matsuoka is toward NTV, considering the whole Kokubun DASH incident (TOKIO's long-running NTV farm show) should've left him with a grudge against them, lol.
…yeah, maybe that's actually right.
(From the uncut press conference footage aired on "Jouhou 7 Days News Caster")
"Neither our leader nor I have any idea what Kokubun actually did.
I think it's fine to just leave it at that now — and I bet everyone watching feels the same.
More than what actually happened, I think what matters is the situation we're in now because of it."
(He was sent off with applause after the press conference ended.)
If that's how he feels, he should just quit.
Don't go pitching products with that kind of attitude either.
honestly, "I saw it on the news/in the paper" still carries more weight than "I read it on 5ch."
As long as you're operating on someone else's turf, you can't just do whatever you want. If you don't like that, the answer is to build your own platform and do your own thing there.
Something like Downtown Plus (the comedy duo Downtown's own subscription platform), where you take on all the risk yourself, is the real answer.
It's a waste of public airwaves — terrestrial TV should just go off the air already.
But it's a fact that TV was more entertaining back when it still had that "Heisei brain" mindset, though.
I'm "Heisei brain" too, born in the late Showa 50s (late 1970s), but
the '90s really were good.
Dramas, music shows, CDTV, stuff like that.
That said, I never watched comedy or variety shows even back then.
People around me stopped watching TV around the mid-2000s too —
TV got boring and people quit watching it while it was still the Heisei era.
Background and key points of this topic
TOKIO was originally a five-member group, but Tatsuya Yamaguchi left over a scandal in 2018, followed by Taichi Kokubun in 2024, leaving the group now effectively down to a two-man lineup of Shigeru Joshima and Matsuoka. The mocking references to the group’s “scandal rate” that ran through the thread stem from this history. What tends to get overlooked, though, is that Matsuoka’s comment wasn’t about any individual scandal — it was aimed at the recent tendency to make a fuss over variety-show remarks without distinguishing legitimate criticism from outright slander. In fact, the malicious online attacks on cast members of “VIVANT” mentioned at the end of the original article are a textbook example of exactly the kind of “taking it too seriously” reaction Matsuoka was pointing at — showing that TV compliance debates and online hostility are really two sides of the same coin.
※This article is composed from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Entertainment/Sports Breaking News+) thread “[Entertainment] Masahiro Matsuoka addresses TV compliance: “What’s said on TV isn’t something you should take seriously,” “getting so worked up over it…”“.
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