Really, AP? You think there’s too much speculation about those North Korean coup rumors? Here’s a news tip.

If Kim Jong Un’s handlers, Jang Song-Thaek and Choe Ryong-Hae, really did just suppress an attempted coup in Pyongyang that killed 20 or 30 soldiers, it would have made a hell of a racket, and you’d think at least one diplomat or journalist would have heard it. That’s why I tend to doubt that the story is true, but if it is true, it might be the biggest North Korea story since the revelation of the concentration camps a decade ago. The AP, ironically, bemoans the irresponsibility of this speculative reporting.

So which is it — illness or a gun battle? Perhaps neither. North Korea watchers are skeptical of the illness claim, but even an unnamed government official cited in the South Korean account said the firefight “has still not been 100 percent confirmed.”

This is what happens when insatiably curious journalists in Seoul are starved for information about their tight-lipped, isolated rival to the north.

Many seemingly over-the-top news stories cite anonymous government or intelligence officials, North Korean defectors claiming to have sources in their former homeland or simply murky, unexplained, unnamed “sources.” Few explain where they get their information, and many reports turn out to be wrong.

In a supreme irony, Bureau Chief Jean H. Lee, who may well have been in Pyongyang at the time, gets a mention in the credit line.

Like the AP, I too lament the fact that no professional journalists in Pyongyang have enlightened us with objective factual reporting, and that none of them has testified whether they heard anything but chirping crickets on the day when the Black Maria came for ex-Unterführer Ri Yong Ho. After all, to quote Lee, “We’ve communicated our standards of journalism and won’t compromise. We will adhere to AP standards. The North Korean government doesn’t screen anything we write.” What a perfect opportunity to test those bold assertions of independence.

Failing that, the AP has two highly professional, inquisitive, and fearless North Korean journalists on its staff who were certainly in Pyongyang at the time, and who have never refused to cover a story. In that case, maybe they can pop by Ri’s former office to check for bullet scars or fresh spackle.