“The media loves the bizarre.”
There were many memorable moments during the first full week of the 2018 Winter Olympics, but the most indelible image might not be from the ice or the slopes, but rather, from the stands; it’s simply impossible to ignore the North Korean cheerleaders who have descended upon Pyeongchang.
First of all, there are 229 of them. (For comparison’s sake, North Korea only sent 22 athletes to actually compete in the games.) They are all, by design, about the same height, age, and weight. Dressed in matching tracksuits, traveling in double-filed lines, and always chaperoned (even on bathroom visits), they fill the stands anywhere North (and, sometimes, South) Korean athletes compete, clapping and cheering to their own meticulous beat, waving flags featuring the Korean peninsula, occasionally donning creepy masks of a generically attractive man. It’s understandable why they have captured more headlines in the last week than most Olympic athletes will in a lifetime; why the New York Times spent a night with them, why Newsweek is tracking their down time in Pyeongchang, why fans and photographers flock to their side wherever they go.
It’s understandable — but is it defensible? Is all of this ogling just what North Korea was hoping for when they decided, at the last minute, to send a contingent to South Korea? Jenny Town, the managing editor of 38 North and the assistant director of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, thinks this is all playing right into North Korea’s hands.
“The media loves the bizarre, they love these caricature images of North Korea, so there’s this over-obsession with trying to figure them out,” Town told ThinkProgress. “It really steals focus away from the better storylines.”
Not only has North Korea and its cheerleaders sucked up a lot of attention the past week, the coverage they’ve garnered has been quite fawning; if you’ve been a casual peruser of Olympic headlines (the way most fans across the world are), you’d think that North Korea and South Korea are approximately one Olympics closing ceremony and a handshake away from turning the DMZ into an artifact of the past.
Of course, as it always is, the reality behind the proverbial pom-poms is much more bleak.
Take the women’s hockey team, for example.
