The news priorities of international and South Korean media organizations are strikingly different at times. A case in point would be Monday of last week, when the UN released its damning report on human rights abuses in North Korea. On the BBC News Online’s world news front page, the UN report was the top story.

On the website of the South Korean news agency Yonhap, by contrast, the same report was in fifth position on the front page. For Yonhap the top two stories were the breaking news about a fatal building collapse in Kyongju and the terrorist attack in Egypt which had killed two South Korean tourists the day before. Meanwhile, for the BBC the Egypt story was buried deep on its Asia news page and the Kyongju story had not yet appeared anywhere on the site (although it did later).

Similar striking differences in emphasis were writ large during the Korean peninsula crisis in the first half of 2013.While the international news media became suddenly obsessed with North Korea and the apparent threat of war, in South Korea there were various other stories competing for attention which were often treated as more important than the ongoing confrontation with the North. One rather hilarious illustration of this difference of perspective leapt out at me as I wandered around a car park in the quiet mid-Wales town of Welshpool on a Sunday afternoon in April. A headline in the local newspaper that read simply: ‘North Korea ‘At War’. The headline of a rival local paper was somewhat more prosaic: ‘Dog Ban Row Latest’.

“A headline in the local newspaper that read simply: ‘North Korea ‘At War'”

There are two sides to this story. On the one hand, Yonhap and other South Korean news outlets tend to place more importance on South Korean news stories and less on North Korea-related ones. This obviously makes sense since they are aiming mainly at a South Korean audience. On the other hand, the BBC and other international outlets tend to concentrate on North Korea news stories and rarely report South Korea related news, which is not seen as ‘international’ news. There is some logic to this: a domestic South Korean outlet focuses on South Korean news while an international outlet like the BBC focuses on the big international story that is North Korea.

“International outlets tend to concentrate on North Korea news stories and rarely report South Korea related news, which is not seen as ‘international’ news”

But I don’t think this explains everything. There are some deeper reasons for the divergence.

In the case of Yonhap, it certainly may have been the case during the years of the ‘Sunshine Policy’ that reporting of negative stories about North Korea was minimized to some extent in order to smooth over relations between the North and South. But now, with a conservative government that is often openly hostile to the North, that explanation seems unlikely. I think another explanation may be simply North Korea fatigue.

In a society where young men still spend about two years in military service, the ‘threat from the North’ is a ubiquitous part of South Koreans’ lives from an early age. South Koreans are constantly told how bad North Korea is and do not need endless new stories about human rights abuses or the peccadillos of the North Korean ruling elite. North Korea is an unfortunate fact of life rather than an exciting and exotic new story.

When we come to the BBC, the story is a bit more complicated. It has traditionally overlooked South Korea for various reasons. Partly because South Korea is something of an overlooked country in general, wedged in between the two big East Asian powers. It’s also firmly in the U.S. sphere of cultural, political and military influence and somewhere that has never had BBC World Service broadcasting (although some people are trying to change that).

At the same time, the fascination with North Korea among the international news media has become quite universal. In addition to its honorary status as the last true Stalinist dictatorship, North Korea itself seems to do much to nurture this fascination by providing those bizarre tidbit stories that the modern click-baiting media loves so much.

“Does the international media spend so much time on North Korea because there is a demand from the public to know about the place, or does the media itself create the fascination with North Korea through its sensationalized style of reporting?”

The BBC may care about its ‘news values’ more than many other media outlets, but in the age of internet advertising and constant scrutiny of page-views its editorial values are also led to some extent by what gets hits. Hence, like the Daily Mail and other UK news websites it seems to have been increasing its level of North Korea coverage recently. This raises one of those age-old media questions: does the international media spend so much time on North Korea because there is a demand from the public to know about the place, or does the media itself create the fascination with North Korea through its sensationalized style of reporting? Predictably, the answer to this is probably a bit of both.

For regular followers of North Korean news, looking at the South Korean media can be an important corrective. Not only because South Korean news outlets are often (but not always) better informed about North Korea than the international media, but also because the difference in priorities and emphasis can be very useful in getting perspective on events in North Korea. And perspective, along with context, is often sorely lacking from English-language media coverage of North Korea.

Picture: O. Miller