The question of why the newspapers didn’t do it is best left to historians to ponder. Perhaps I was right to say, “one possible reason was that the media did not want to. Newspapers were not in the information business. They were in the narrative business; and in that profession an editor’s chief ambition is to retain the power to keep his tale in the service of whichever great ideology or personal lord he served.” Perhaps Curtis Melvin’s site will evolve into a network of colleagues, who like astronomers, will parcel out North Korea into sectors, according to spectrum and knowledge domain until they discover more about it than perhaps even the Dear Leader knows. Who can say where it will lead: will such efforts continue to flourish or will pressure be exerted to bring the flood of knowledge back within the old bounds? Are we living in the golden age of political discovery that will soon be past or simply waiting on verge of something even greater? |
Posts
