A new kind of election monitoring divided opinions.
South Korea has voted in the parliamentary elections today, Wednesday. The country’s biggest TV channels are fiercely competing for young viewers, and in order to attract them, the channels have used computer graphics in a huge way.
The election candidates have been made into computer characters, avatars, who compete with each other in different arenas as the vote counting progresses.
The SBS channel presents the leaders of the main parties as characters from the action movie Mission Impossible. The presidents battle it out on the roof of a speeding train, trying to secure as many seats as possible in South Korea’s parliament, the National Assembly.
SBS gained the largest share of viewers aged 20-49 when the channels aired polls for the 2022 election. At that time, SBS showed the leaders of the main parties competing in the Winter Olympics, says British Broadcasting Corporation BBC.
Tonight, too, SBS will present the candidates, for example, racing on mopeds and dancing on top of a jukebox as dolls.
The South Korean broadcasting company KBS responds to the challenge by presenting a rap contest of party leader avatars, whose songs are written with the party’s election promises.
The young may be attracted, the elderly are strange
The flashy use of computer graphics may attract a young audience to watch the election broadcasts. The young people interviewed by the BBC said that they watched programs that now did not seem boring.
Member of the SBS news management team Cho Jeong admits to the BBC that some older viewers have found the broadcasts “a bit noisy”.
Professor at Hankuk University in Korea Kim Chunsik criticized the excessive use of entertainment for the BBC.
– The use of graphics on Korean TV channels is undeniably entertaining and contains many funny elements. […] Still, when you look at the election broadcasts as a whole, they do not contain much information that voters should consider when making voting decisions.
Power changing?
The election is held as a referendum on the president Yoon Suk Yeol’s instead of. According to forecasts, the People’s Power party led by him is suffering a clear defeat.
The opposition can get up to 200 seats in the 300-seat National Assembly. In this case, the opposition could, among other things, overturn the president’s decisions.
Other topics of the election are the difficult economic situation, the financial problems of the youth and the extremely low birth rate.
Source: AFP