Placing Rhetoric: Good vs. Evil

In TheArts section of today's New York Times, a review of Anna Politkovskaya's collections of essays, "Is Journalism Worth Dying For?" appears on the same page as an article about the opening of the new Harry Potter exhibition at Discovery Times Square.  Even though the title of the Politkovskaya review was more provocative: "Directly Confronting the Appalling", I read the review on the Harry Potter films first, probably because the title was bigger.  At least I would like to think so.  And besides, it is a lot easier to 'directly' confront good vs. evil in the confines of a film than to have to acknowledge its presence in the real world.  That's why fantasy works so well for Western audiences, just ask Freud.
The juxtaposition by the placing of the two articles reminds me of the separate pulls of interest often aligned with Eastern and Western audiences: one serious (discourse of real life), the other, play (discourse of fantasy life).  Together, the articles become, each, a brief requiem legitimating to whatever degree their subject.  Here, media conflates, conjoins and recontextualizes the serious and the play.
The question posed by the title of Politkovskaya's book is no doubt unanswerable for now, and I would be in no position to presume an answer.  "Requiem" by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) also drew condemnation and threats by the government though she did not pay with her life as did Politkovskaya, who was assasinated in Moscow in 2006.
Here, a brief excerpt from "Requiem":

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.

 It happened like this when only the dead
Were smiling, glad of their release,
That Leningrad hung around its prisons
Like a worthless emblem, flapping its piece.
Shrill and sharp, the steam-whistles sang
Short songs of farewell
To the ranks of convicted, demented by suffering,
As they, in regiments, walked along -
Stars of death stood over us
As innocent Russia squirmed
Under the blood-spattered boots and tyres
Of the black marias