News Coverage

The news here is different. You don't have the talking heads, you don't have conservative versus liberal reporting and punditry and you don't have bad news. What you have is oblivious news. What do I mean by 'oblivious news'? I'll tell you...

According to Seoul papers and news, everything is alright... all the time. Sure, they'll report AP acticles if Seoul or Korea wasn't mentioned negatively, but any mention of the won falling in value, rise in poverty, decline in property value or any other domestic problem will not be seen. They cable news here is for positive stories and the printed news is for the same. I thought that sounded like we were living under a propaganda machine, only spitting out great things that Seoul has to offer, but there's a difference.

The people know that there are problems, they do, but they never think things can ever get as bad as they have been in the past. They never think that Japan will occupy them again and they never think another economic crisis, like the 1997 one, will occur again. Yeah, you can pick up the Korean Times or the Korean Herald and get some dirt on the government. I did when I first got here and read the cover story. It was reporting that the Minister of Education was being investigated for stealing the dissertations of his students and passing them off as his own. He was and therefore, forced to resign. The Korean papers did not report that. The Herald covered the missile launch issue very well. The Korean papers made mention of it in passing. Instead the headlines were about the World Cup and where Korea went wrong. I'm not saying the Koreans didn't know about it, but they were not interested in reading about it. Their mind's are already made up about what to do with the North, so they rather be entertained by soccerl. Sound familiar?

You ask yourself, how could they get away with that? How can the papers in a major city not report huge things like that? The only answer I can come up with is this: The people don't want it. There is no audience for that here. They do not want to be bothered by problems. I know more about what is going on in Korea than all of the Korean teachers at my school combined.

This is a topic I'll continue to write about in the months to come, so if I didn't give you enough in this very short post, just give me some more time and I'll try and figure this oddity out. Have a nice day guys.