Pulled Quotes

I was reading the USA Today yesterday and found an article entitled “Teens losing touch with historical references.”  Greg Toppo began this article with a lead that is, to say the least, not very fact-laden:  “Big Brother.  McCarthyism.  The patience of Job.”  He explains further on that these are references that are going unrecognized more and more as today’s teens find other interests besides their parents’ pop culture, but it takes a little reading before he actually gets to the meat of his article. 

 Apparently, a recent study of 1,200 high schoolers indicates that overall, they were capable of earning a C in history and an F in literature, according to the article.  There were some areas where students learned more than others- specifically, civil-rights-era American history took precedence over classic literature, perhaps a side effect of encouraging (or more accurately, requiring) teachers to focus on math and reading skills during classroom time that used to be reserved for liberal arts education.

 He obviously didn’t follow the inverted pyramid style, but for this article, I think that’s ok.  He mentions a few statistics that contextualize what teens are and aren’t learning around the middle of the article, and uses pretty hefty quotes from people like Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and Chester Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, yet only a one-line quote is credited to Trevor Packer of The College Board.  This article could have been better-rounded if he included quotes from students, perhaps, such as those who don’t know Winston Smith from Joseph McCarthy.

Oh, (big) brother.  If teens don’t even know 1984 these days, maybe we were better off with you watching us…

Today I want to discuss the radically different ways that a story can be presented, using the New York Philharmonic playing in North Korea as an example. I’ve found two different articles, one in the Financial Times and one from Yahoo News that treat the story completely differently.

The Financial Times article has the headline “Ovation in Pyongyang is music to US ears.” It leads with the North Korean audience’s standing ovation for the US musicians and talks about the performance as generating “rapturous applause.” It has a lot of really interesting quotes from North Koreans (which I wonder how they got, since North Korea is notoriously restrective of the press), and by the end makes it seem like democracy and prosperity and general fun are about to break out in North Korea because of the New York Philharmonic.

The Yahoo News story, though, paints a different picture, under the headline “New York Phil gets muted reaction.” It mentions the standing ovation in the second paragraph, but focuses significantly more on how the concert wasn’t well received by the North Korean media. It doesn’t have any quotes from actual North Koreans, but has a bit from state-controlled newspapers.

I’m not really sure whether the performance was met with “rapturous applause” or golf claps, or why these stories are so different, but I have a few ideas. For one, FT is a British paper, which from what I understand, doesn’t try very hard to hide its liberal positions; Yahoo is essentially a wire source, which strives for neutrality. It’s probably to FT’s political advantage to report that North Korea is on the verge of breaking out into democracy, though I’m still damn impressed that they got those quotes from real North Koreans.

Another cause for this disparity could be the sources. Yahoo is looking at the state papers, while FT is talking to the people, which in a totalitarian state, probably say very different things.