Friday, November 20, 2009

Pop Culture

How do pop cultures deal with poverty in North Korea?

There are not many but there are some documentary movies focusing on its severity of the problems in North Korea.

Here are some of the exapmles.

Kimjonggila(2009)








http://www.kimjongiliathemovie.com/swf/trailer.html




Inside North Korea

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/3089/Overview#tab-Overview








Children of the Secret State(2000)









http://www.hardcashproductions.com/recent02.html




Crossing(2008)








http://www.crossingnk.com/pages/td.html

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Mass Media

North Korea has limited mass media power so that mass media in North Korea hardly discusses about the issue, as mentioned in the last blog.

Then, how is the issue debated in the United States?

The mass media in the United States has been talking about the poverty in North Korea for a long time.

It gets attention especially when North Korea launches the missiles. Once, United Nations decided to give sanctions to North Korea due to their nuclear missile program and poverty in North Korea was on the issue in the world. Recently, when South Korea decided to offer food aids to North Korea and North Korea’s leader and Kim Jong-Il went to China, mass media puts attention to North Korea. Also, when two American journalists were arrested in North Korea due to their illegal entrance to North Korea, the mass media put a huge attention to it and there was a huge debate in the United States.

However, mostly the attention goes to their nuclear program and its harsh dictatorship and not much focus goes to poverty. Even though the United Nation often discusses about North Korea’s human rights and poverty, mass media only focuses on the major problems that has an effect to the world and does not show problems inside the nation. The biggest reason for that is people in the U.S. are not interested in the other countries’ inside problems. So it is hard for people in the world to notice about poverty in North Korea. North Korea has difficult situation for freedom of expression for the citizens so that there is nobody to solve this problem.

The United Nations talks about poverty in North Korea. But they also need to talk about sanction to North Korea’s nuclear programs. That sanction ended up giving less food import for North Korea and it leads more serious hunger problem to North Korea. But if there is no sanction to North Korea, they would create nuclear missile more and make more disaster to the world.

And news about North Korea through the U.S. media is, I feel, apathetic. There is not much sympathetic emotion to the problems in North Korea. It is understandable because North Korea is the one causing its problem. So when people around the world see the problems in North Korea, they see it like, “oh, again, North Korea is doing something stupid” or “they are causing problems by themselves.” Some people may think like “North Korea just wants an attention from the world, that’s why they have problems all the time.”

I found this video clip and this depicts well what the world thinks about North Korea.

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