Hi. Are you going to comment on the BB media article that wrongly attributed Shawols calling out the new yorker article to Armys, and then claiming that the Shawols' actions amounted to "cyber bullying"? And then when Armys chose to block and ignore those journalists, the journos called it blacklisting?? l I've been looking for someone to really break down that whole mess because I was just appalled by how completely unprofessional every journalist involved in that situation was.
I said I will answer this, so here I am. I will also link the two articles to be read before diving in into my answer in case someone doesn't know what this is about.
How BTS Became One of the Most Popular Bands in History - The New Yorker
For the Record: When Is a Hiatus Not a Hiatus? When BTS Says So - Billboard
I'll start by saying that The New Yorker article was a weak piece overall because it didn't bring anything new to the surface, no different perspective on BTS and their place in K-Pop and global music landscape. The author mainly focused on the diversity of its fanbase in terms of nationality, ethnicity and all the good things army did and last but not least, on the group's narrative of self love and acceptance which has become the main talking point of fans. In my opinion, this dependence on BTS and the comfort they bring is really connected to the high demand and delivery of content of all types which ironically has lead to the hiatus and consequently armys crying about it. But that's a different discussion.
The journalist did a poor job with their research and there was a certain disdain towards the K-Pop industry in which they picked and chose and wrongly reported on the evils of the industry as compared to what BTS did. Not only the information was wrong, it was artificially connected to BTS in order to have them in a better light as opposed to their peers. Once again, it is shameful to use the death of an artist as merely a statistic or to point out what type of industry K-Pop is, just to make the point about BTS and the UNICEF campaign. How are these events correlated, apart from the fact that they happened in the same year? But this is not the first time Jonghyun's name is used as a talking point and there is no excuse for journalists to parrot the same Western discourse.
How could this person also state ''the K-pop group Big Bang, whose singers have been convicted of sex trafficking, gambling, and drug crimes'' and use this factually wrong information to contrast it with RM's feminist reading list and some soft support for the queer community? This is libel towards the group Big Bang and I was shocked at the fact that the article got a green light, was read by an editor and then published in this form.
There's an interesting line in the first paragraph that goes like this: ''I absorbed Western critiques of K-pop’s girl and boy bands: that they’re fluffy, manufactured, and exploitative of their members—as if the same weren’t true of New Kids on the Block. But, earlier this year, BTS became inescapable. The group was everywhere, and everyone seemed to be into them. To continue ignoring the BTS phenomenon was to risk missing something bigger than Beatlemania.'' It seems that the journalist had an attempt at going beyond western critique, but only in the case of BTS. Apparently, when it comes to other K-Pop groups, it's fine to still have that mindset, to falsely report or use someone's death to prove a point and put BTS on a pedestal.
I think this article, as much as it's basically praise for the group, it's a big disservice to BTS as well because once again, it isolates them in a way that legitimizes what army has been saying for years, that BTS are more special than K-Pop, that they're not part of that. I think it's possible to write about how a K-Pop group reached a certain level of stardom, without looking at the industry in which they have been part of, as this place of evil. I didn't read one line from this journalist about the Korean fans. It was only about international fans wanting to know more about Korean culture and language and how beautiful and fascinating all is. It's sad that a Korean-American journalist fell into the orientalism narrative and wrote an entire article about BTS from a typical Western stance. Countless articles have been written about BTS's exceptionalism but which always fail in delivering fact checking information on K-Pop and which to this day are looking at the industry through a negative othering lens.
As to the Billboard article, once again we have an example of unprofessionalism. The journalist confused Shawols with Army. How was that even possible? I have no idea, but it's a stupid mistake. But I do think that when mentioning the cyberbullying, the journalist had Army in mind given the context of the entire paragraph and the full article. At the very least, that part should have been edited and the author should do a more thorough research. But I do think it's interesting that Billboard has finally published a piece on army's behavior. This is a hot debate in the music journalism circle right now and I know it only got bigger since Juwon Park was harassed. There's a lot of K-Pop/Army journalists who have paid lip service to fans because they do benefit from that. If one writes only good things about BTS, then the fans don't come for them and they do get more traffic and make a name for themselves on BTS twitter. But this created an environment in which no other perspectives were allowed, let alone a hint of negative criticism because we can all see what happens. Journalists are in danger of losing their job or getting doxxed. And army does have blacklists which include every journalist that said something that puts Army/BTS in a bad light. It's 21st century McCarthyism. In what free and democratic world are journalists prohibited and demanded to just write positive things about what they observe? Not only that, what is considered positive is something that the fandom decides. But it happens in all areas, not just music/fandom reporting. The terms alternative facts and fake news/media have become common in our vocabulary and automatic distrust of journalists has become the norm. This is an authoritarian stance in which free press doesn't seem to find its place anymore.