The resurrection of Hyon Song Wol

Last August, the Chosun Ilbo reported that Kim Jong Un had ordered the executions of former girlfriend Hyon Song Wol and the other members of the all-female performing group, the Unhasu Orchestra, for making porn videos. Media around the world leapt all over the story, but as you will recall, I reacted skeptically. I mocked the sensationalism of it, writing, “Three million deaths is a statistic, but a dead porn star is a headline.” I then explained the reasons for my skepticism. As we learned over the weekend, that skepticism was justified. Hyon, or so we are informed, has appeared on North Korean television, alive.

This may also be an appropriate time to resurrect something else — my post about how to recognize a B.S. story from North Korea.

As an aside, if Hyon Song Wol whacked me over the head and took my wallet, I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup. I don’t know if the woman who appeared on North Korean TV is really Ms. Hyon at all, and don’t care enough to check. I also question the basis for knowing that she “dated” Kim Jong Un (if that’s the right word for it). I think facts like these are unknowable.

For what it’s worth, The Washington Post‘s Terrence McCoy quotes me in this morning’s paper, commenting on the story. If I take issue with anything in McCoy’s story, it’s that KCNA really did say that North Korean archeologists had discovered a unicorn lair. Here’s the original English-language story. At the time, there was much quibbling about whether “unicorn” was the proper translation of the original Korean, but (1) to some extent, KCNA ought to be held responsible for its own translations, (2) as I noted in my original post on the story, KCNA had translated it as “unicorn-lion” and described the animal as “mythical” in previous stories, and (3) either way, we’re still speaking of the alleged discovery of a mythical animal’s lair by real archeologists, which is silly no matter how you look at it.

The point of which is that in North Korea, it can be difficult to tell truth from fiction or parody. I’m sure that every Korea watcher — including me — has believed some nonsense stories about North Korea. It’s seldom possible to be sure when the regime in Pyongyang keeps North Korea so opaque. Even so, as I told Mr. McCoy, there are some horrible and lurid stories coming out of North Korea that affect many more North Korean lives, and that go underreported because they don’t have the appeal of sex or sadism.

Why do reporters get it wrong? First, not all do. Some are very careful. Others are sloppy, and will print anything to attract page views. Second, the temptation to run with these stories is partially sensationalism, yes, but on a certain level, they’re newsworthy. We don’t worry about nuclear-armed countries that are rational, deterrable, and hold human life in some regard. If North Korea has nuclear weapons and also takes pleasure in taking life, that has important implications. In fact, North Korea’s leaders probably do have some regard for the lives of high-caste North Koreans — including their own families and social circles — and are largely indifferent to the suffering of others (foreigners and lower-caste North Koreans). In practice, indifference is often the deadlier alternative.

What should reporters learn from this? In the short term, they should be suspicious of sensational stories (involving sex or gruesome deaths) from unlikely sources (inside the royal court) that can’t be corroborated by extrinsic evidence (known witnesses who can be questioned, reliable statistical evidence, or imagery). Obviously, extrinsic evidence from North Korea is scarce. Even then, we have to accept that sometimes, reporters will get it wrong. Readers should judge a journalist’s work by the quality of its investigation, by the evidence supporting it at the time of publication, and by the journalist’s commitment to correcting a bad story later.

In the long term, news organizations should widen their access to extrinsic evidence. The Associated Press tried one way. By itself, that’s not a bad thing, but the AP made some unattractive ethical compromises in doing so, and the arrangement didn’t live up to the promise. A better alternative, given Pyongyang’s control of the media, is for more established news services with money, resources, and high editorial standards to partner themselves with North Korean guerrilla journalists for services like Rimjingang and The Daily NK, which have a reasonably good record of reliability, and whose correspondents are willing to risk execution to get the story. Combining the raw courage of these guerrilla journalists with state-of-the-art communications technology could reduce the number of trips across the border and make their reporting and transmissions harder to detect. Just look how much they added to the story of the building collapse in Pyongyang, and how little a certain established news service added to it.

The end result of such a partnership carries its own risks, especially for the North Korean journalists themselves, but it would inform us all better. It might even distract us away from lurid, apocryphal stories of palace intrigues, back to the reality in which the majority of North Koreans somehow endure.