More nuance needed in covering South Korea

April 20, 2026

Mr Armstrong,

I have learned to pay attention to South Korea because a relative of mine is a long term member of “Army”, the enormous fan base of BTS, whose comeback concert you covered on 16 April.

At the time you wrote that the Korea Times reported only 46,000 attended the concert and suggested that was a reason for a drop in the share price of the parent company. These claims, repeated not just by your good self, but my many media outlets around the world outraged “Army” fans who knew that the true figure was much larger. There is much speculation about why political and business forces within Korea are hell-bent on damaging, Hybe - BTS’s parent company.

Isn’t it interesting that today the same media outlet, T_he Korea Times_ shamelessly published an article “Korea sees record foreign arrivals in first quarter” in which the estimated attendance at that concert at over 100,000?

This reader values Pearls and Irritations because it avoids blindly repeating the ’news’ as handed down by the mainstream media. You should not assume that Asian mastheads are any more reliable than our own.