The NYT: Coming to a Supermarket Checkout Near You

If you’d like a case-in-point in media bias, look no further than this NYT piece on Christian human rights activists for North Korea by Norimitsu Onishi. There is plenty of good North Korea coverage at the Times, most of it written by James Brooke and David Sanger, but seldom by Onishi, who tends to write puff pieces about social trends and other more superficial matters. Part of Onishi’s problem is that he may be somewhat out of his league, but it doesn’t end there.

Don’t take it from me. At this point, I’ll hand the mike to a fellow member of Onishi’s profession, an experienced journalist who writes for a “mainstream” publication, one not generally known to have conservative bias. The journalist-TKL reader, who asks not to be named for understandable reasons, calls the article “one of the most subtly pernicious, misleading stories I’ve ever seen in a paper with the possible exception of the National Enquirer, World News, or other supermarket tabs.” Ouch. Specifics? I’ll let him start, and I’ll finish:

Onishi made not the slightest reference to the work of Christian missionaries in shielding NKorean refugees in China, to their efforts in getting them through China into Mongolia or Vietnam or Thailand or Hong Kong or into some foreign embassy…..He said nothing about the efforts of such Christian missionaries as Tim Peters, well known here, and Douglas Shin…..He deliberately overlooked historic Christian role as defenders of human rights going back to March 1, 1919, revolution, in which Christians played a major role against Japan. He “forgot” the point is not the shift of Christian thinking from leftist human rights campaigns in NKorea to conservative pressure for human rights in Japan — the point is that Christians have been at the forefront in all these struggles. Onishi is an intelligent person. He obviously overlooked all that in order to drive home his own point, his leftist sympathy with North Korea, his support for leftist policies of SKorean govt and his support for radical anti-American demonstrators.

. . . .

One other point that Onishi overlooked — what is now NKorea was focal point of missionary activity in pre-communist days. Pyongyang was known as “city of churches right through the period of Japanese colonialism. And Hungnam and Hangnum were also Christian centers. So it’s logical that Christianity shd be reapparing in highly risky underground settings, by no means all influenced by aid-givers. Many reflect proslytizing by escapees, Korean-Chinese across Tumen and Yalu rivers, etc.

There are two specific passages that cause Onishi to lose my respect, and both consist of uncritically relaying the anti-human rights view of North Korea (hey, let’s just call it what it’s occasionally admitted to be). First, this:

Against this political backdrop, it is an open secret that some North Korean defectors and their backers exaggerate their experiences in the North. “They exaggerate their stories for money and fame,” said the Reverend Joseph Park, the Christian Council of Korea’s mission director. “They say that they were political prisoners when they were ordinary prisoners, or that they saw something they only heard about.”

Onishi provides absolutely no examples or support of any kind for this. I could counter that in the bazaars of Damascus, it’s “well known” that Jews bake charicatures of Mohammad onto their Passover matzos, but it wouldn’t be any more true. What is also well known – but well documented – is that North Korea has resisted myriad demands to inspect its concentration camps to either confirm or refute those allegations (Onishi doesn’t mention that). Onishi provides no background on Park or his group’s agenda, although most politically literate readers can guess where the far-far-left National Council of Churches stands:

The Reverend Kim Tae Hyun, an official at the National Council of Churches in Korea, which supports the South Korean government’s low-key approach on human rights, criticizes missionaries who send North Koreans living in China back into the North to proselytize secretly.
“They are putting the defectors at great risk,” Kim said.

Low-key approach? That’s certainly putting it mildly. That policy, to the extent that it exists at all, lies somewhere between “pearls for a pig,” “die in place,” “it’s too small to actually see,” and “Arbeit Macht Frei.”

What’s more fundamentally off about Onishi’s piece is the distortion he serves to his readers – that all activism for human rights in North Korea is exclusively based on one monolithic, fanatical, soul-greedy religious view (something my presence in prominent NK-HR groups ought to at least partially refute). Onishi clearly expects Times readers to despise evangelical Christianity more than, say, juche. He can only do this by ignoring the religious and ideological diversity of this movement, and also by ingoring the very real personal risks Christians are taking to save North Koreans physically.

There is much Onishi should have done to research this story, but a good first step would have been to read about the fate of Reverend Kim Dong Shik.