Philharmonic rocks North Korea–or not?
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.
