Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

WASHINGTON — While North Korea geared up for the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Korean War armistice, much of the western world was consumed by far happier news.

“We’ve just received an important message from London,” said the pilot of a British Airways flight carrying me from London to Washington.

What could be so earth-shaking as to get him to break into the quiet of the packed cabin with anything other than dire words affecting the flight, perhaps the plane itself? He followed up a second or so later. “I am delighted to inform you that Kate Middleton has just given birth to a baby boy.” Laughter and a ripple of applause up and down the aisles

For the past few days before I took off there had been news that the baby was overdue, then the revelation that the palace had never given an exact due date and that perhaps everyone had the date slightly wrong. Finally, as I was rushing for the tube to Heathrow came the portentous bulletins — “breaking news,” proclaimed BBC and CNN: Kate was “in early stages of labor.”

For a foreigner, the arrival of a prince who might some day ascend to the throne of only symbolic significance might seem to have been a bit over-hyped. Over the course of nearly a week in London, I’d seen so many stories about the imminent birth, so much speculation about whether it would be a boy or a girl, so much nonsense about the royal nursery that I was quite tired of it.

Talking heads abounded on TV screens, reporters going “live,” experts offering learned views. You had to wonder about the nature of a society that placed so much emphasis on a simple royal birth when all else seemed so grim — a stagnating economy, racial tensions, crime and corruption.

But think again — wasn’t a happy story just what Britain, and the rest of the world, badly needed? Weren’t viewers and readers entitled to some relief after all the bad news stories? For months, it seemed, almost all we were getting were stories of violence and rape — violence from Africa through the Middle East to Afghanistan and Pakistan, rape in India where I’ve been spending much of this year. Then there was the usual bad news of European nations, mostly the southern tier from Spain to Greece, suffering varying stages of economic malaise.

Moving on to northeast Asia, we had the news late last year of the launching of a North Korean satellite at the tip of a missile that could in theory hurl a warhead as far as the U.S. west coast. Then came word in February that North Korea had conducted an underground nuclear test. For weeks alarms were ringing — North Korea was on the verge of making good on some of those threats to turn the South into “a sea of fire.” Was Armageddon on hand at last?

In India, the news was different but also awful. There were days when the big national newspapers seemed like daily crime reports — rapes and murders were happening all over.

Delhi was sometimes called the country’s “rape capital” — whether because there were actually more rapes there than in other huge metropolitan regions or that they were reported more often, who knows? On almost every page was a rape story, interspersed with news of murders and other forms of mayhem, all against a background of greed and corruption in high places.

The unrelieved good news of the birth of a boy to Kate and William was obviously the best kind of antidote to bad news stories that never seemed to stop coming. Don’t count, though, on the British media remaining so kind and devoted to the royal family, even to an eight pound, six ounce heir to the throne.

London tabloids over the years have feasted on just about every kind of royal scandal, most often, it seems, having to do with adultery. The tabloids reveled in every bad news story they could find about Prince William’s father, Prince Charles, first heir to the throne, and his mother, Princess Diana.

Headlines blared out tales of their divorce, their affairs and her death in August 1997 while fleeing from the paparazzi with her lover of the moment, Dodi Fayed, son of Mohamed Al-Fayed, owner of, among other properties, the Ritz in Paris and Harrods, the luxury London department store.

There was always, in the tabloid coverage, the sense that their editors were as eager to undermine and destroy royalty as they were to venerate and honor tradition. For now the media seems happy to build up the mythology of royalty while acts of war and terrorism dominate so much else deemed worthy of making real news.

  A royal birth as a welcome symbol of good in a world gone bad, Kate Middleton, Prince William, royal baby