One last gold medal for Korea (the usual one)

Korean broadcasters perfectly wrapped up their coverage of the Rio Olympics by masking the parade of world athletes with the portraits of national competitors they already aired 99% of the time during the whole competition - I actually switched from MBC to SBS because there, that patriotic display filled less than half the screen:

Even when other nations are on screen at Rio 2016, Korea broadcasters manage to show national athletes (20160822 - twitter.com/theseoulvillage/status/767507917016698881)

So once again, Korea claimed the gold medal for national chauvinism on TV, a domain where the country faces much tougher and diverse competition than in archery.

In case you missed the Rio games and the previous editions, here's how it works: 

• all major broadcasters sharing the same rights for the games, the competition among them is all about populism and fueling national fervor
• if a national champion is competing, major broadcasters must also air them live on their dedicated sports channel (and when it's PARK In-bee, throw in that dedicated golf channel for good measure) - when that's a second rate athlete, use the sport channel to rerun the exploits of top tier stars.
• on the last day, when there's 0% chance of medal, start one hour later and replay past medal bouts
• otherwise, may be aired live only universal legends in the very exclusive Usain BOLT - Michael PHELPS league (two more games required for Simone BILES, and Team USA B stood no chance with none of that 1992-dream-team material) - these legends are part of the comfort zone, their presence providing both the 'international' label, and the 'sport domination' alibi
• success basically always relies on the same sports - difficult to grow new vocations without 'training' the audience with a decent pedagogy of Olympic diversity...

Baseball returns to the Olympics for Tokyo 2020, and you don't know what may happen if Korea faces Japan in the finals.

Aaah, Tokyo 2020! Different flavor of ultranationalism there. Today, the Olympic flag was handed to Nippon Kaigi darlings Yuriko Koike (the newly elected governor), and Shinzo Abe, who popped up dressed as Super Mario:

Inspired by Queen Elizabeth II's cameo appearance for London 2012, Shinzo Abe showed up as Super Mario. A weird solo performance (lacking the humor and Bond sidekick), particularly from an elected politician less iconic than British royalty... Imagine Erdogan doing the same for Istanbul 2020. If Abe's less into personal ego than into the revival of the fascist regime, he never misses an opportunity to show his face on an international stage (e.g. featured at the end of each ad of the Japan government's ongoing PR campaign on CNN)

Super Tojo ready for Tojo 2020 - let the Nippon Kaigi games begin!

BREAKING - Shinzo Abe unveils new logo for Tokyo 2020 (Hideki Tojo 2020) (20150911 - twitter.com/theseoulvillage/status/642228805260570624)

Seoul Village 2016
Welcome to our Korean Errlines! Follow Seoul Village on Facebook and Twitter

Add this page to your favorites

.

AHN Cheol-soo(n)

AHN Cheol-soo all but declared his candidacy for this year's presidential elections, a race until now dominated by PARK Geun-hye, and where only he is perceived as a potential game changer.


A book-program-interview ("안철수의 생각" / "Thoughts of Ahn Cheol-soo") flying off the shelves, instantly followed by a show on SBS ("힐링캠프" / "Healing Camp") drawing an audience twice as big as that of rivals PARK and MOON... it only took a couple of days for him to introduce himself to those who didn't know him well.


MOON Jae-in obviously didn't make the most of his time as an official candidate, and the times when he was in virtual ties with PARK in the polls seem long gone. PARK herself lacks charisma. Always dodging touchy issues, she's leveraging on the admiration of elder generations of conservatives for her father, but she never achieved anything beyond backstage politics and frontstage firstladyhood following the death of her mother during an assassination attempt against her father.


AHN has a clear opportunity to reform and reunite the nation if he manages to build a platform consistent with his values, reaching across Korea's utterly divided aisle. More than a few conservative lawmakers may even follow him.


Let's see how the scores evolve. In the polls as well as online, where "AHN Samo" has room for improvement:
. Facebookally, MOON Jae-in leads with 18,073 likes compared to 10,444 for AHN and 4,875 for PARK.
. Twitter-wise, PARK claims 205,759, MOON 29.913, and AHN 24,128


On the other hand, websites seem to mirror their candidates: fun and open for AHN (ahnsamo.kr), paramilitary in English or Kimjongilesque in Korean for PARK (parkgeunhye.or.kr), and very kind, but somehow boring for MOON (moonjaein.com).

 

Seoul Village 2012
Welcome to our Korean Errlines! Follow Seoul Village on Facebook and Twitter

Waiting for the next Olympic games

Following the Olympic Games on Korean TV can be kind of frustrating : the volume of images is absolutely gigantic, but they mostly consist of runs and reruns of Korean triumphs because TV rights have been awarded to a pool of all major broadcasters, and for fear of losing the audience wars, no one dares show any event featuring no national athlete.

And even when there is a Korean athlete, you need to get the side informations over the web (no, I don't enjoy watching Park Tae-hwan ad nauseam and yes, Michael Phelps won that race and snatched a world record).

SBS more than doubled the price to get the TV rights for Olympic Games 2010-2014. The $72.5M deal includes full multimedia rights for North Korea.

Let's hope that by then, all bad habits will have changed both sides of the DMZ.