pbs/abc news to broadcast nyphil from north korea

This just hit the wires moments ago – and it’s exciting stuff – I can remember in my lifetime when a major US news organization had a part in broadcasting a classical music concert. The only parallel in my mind might be Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The New York Philharmonic’s concert in North Korea on Feb. 26 will be broadcast that evening on WNET, Channel 13, and distributed two days later on PBS, broadcast officials said Wednesday.

In an unusual arrangement, ABC News will cooperate with WNET, New York’s public television station, to produce the broadcast. Bob Woodruff, a correspondent for ABC News who has reported from the tightly closed North, will provide “behind-the-scenes coverage” of the concert, WNET said.

the news connection is explained by WNET parent company president Neal Shapiro:

The joint WNET-ABC News effort came from a desire to jump on the newsworthy nature of the event, said Neal Shapiro, president and chief executive of WNET’s parent, the Educational Broadcasting Corporation, which also includes WLIW, Channel 21, on Long Island. Mr. Shapiro is a former producer at ABC News and president of NBC News.

“I didn’t want to just show a concert,” he said in a phone interview. “It was a historic place at a historic time.”

Mr. Shapiro, continued, “What makes it so interesting is the very nature of North Korea and what it means to have an organization steeped in everything that the free world implies, the center of culture and capitalism, making an appearance in North Korea.”