North Korea versus the media: Any guesses?

Today, I offer you two journalists’ perspectives on North Korea’s most recent efforts to use journalists as unwitting propagandists and image-makers, and how well the journalists resisted it. First, the fiercely independent Don Kirk reports on how North Korea censored journalists who crossed the border to cover the family reunions supervised hostage visitations at Kumgang.

The problem exploded as reporters accompanying nearly 400 South Koreans on the first of two sets of reunions entered North Korea at the eastern end of the demilitarized zone that’s divided the Korean peninsula since the end of the Korean War. North Korean officials spent more than an hour studying the contents of the laptops of the 29 journalists on the visit ”“ and held on to some laptops for two or three hours after discovering material they found objectionable.

Among items they wanted expunged ” besides references to human rights abuses ” was anything that appeared to cast North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Un in an unfavorable light or was critical of the North’s nuclear and missile programs and economic problems.

South Korean journalists, writing about the reunions from Seoul on the basis of the pool reports, including print as well as video and audio feeds, were sharply critical in private of what they saw as the weak-kneed response of the unification ministry and the South Korean Red Cross, which selects family members lucky to go on the basis of a lottery. The journalists called for the ministry to adopt a firm stance on behalf of the media in dealing with the North Koreans ”“ a challenge that the ministry feared would complicate and compromise efforts at holding future reunions.

“The ministry merely suggested that reporters traveling to the second round on Saturday through Monday carry blank laptops.” said the conservative Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s biggest selling newspaper. The newspaper quoted a government official as having agreed it was “ ”˜a problem’ that ministry officials bent over backwards to accommodate the North’s whims instead of protesting at what many saw as chicanery.” [Don Kirk, Forbes]

Next, the BBC interviews a correspondent who was in Pyongyang to cover the 70th anniversary of its ruling party, the restrictions Pyongyang imposed on his movements, and whether the image comports with reality. The reporter relates that he was led and escorted everywhere, and couldn’t have dreamed of roaming the streets freely to ask citizens how they really felt about life there. Thankfully, some random citizens made their spontaneous emotions visible to reporters in passing journalismobiles, making all of that reporting unnecessary.

[Next stop, the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum.]

But then, near the end of the interview, the correspondent raises the trite (and ironic) complaint that reporting on North Korea too often descends into caricature and propaganda. Huh. I wonder who is planting those caricatures, or that propaganda.

Admittedly, torchlight parades and neat rows of armed, goose-stepping automatons have more pornographic appeal than interviews of refugees with pixelized faces. I’m sure it’s easier to cover model kindergartens, propaganda exhibitions, and political shrines than concentration camps. It must be easier to cover a staged press conference or a regime-planted “re-defection” story than it is to investigate the truth behind it. And I’m sure that it’s far more lucrative for a wire service to sell KCNA photographs to its subscribers than it is to partner with the world’s bravest journalists to tell its readers how the vast majority of North Korean people actually live.

There’s something awfully hypocritical about journalists who bitch about the very caricatures they perpetuate — caricatures that invariably portray North Koreans as soulless automatons — while brave North Korean guerrilla journalists risk torture and death to defy the state’s limits. Or of academics and reporters who criticize “Western portrayals” of North Koreans, while largely ignoring the evidence that many North Koreans are, in fact, highly intelligent and creative beings who risk their lives to express beauty, love, humor, and even genius.

I don’t want to hear any complaints about caricatures and propaganda from the very people who, in the name of commercial expediency, personal safety, or political motivations, let themselves be led around by nose rings, or who let their minders point their lenses at the caricatures and the propaganda. If you’re tired of the caricature, stop perpetuating it. At the very least, tell the other side of the story. Research the things they tell you in Pyongyang, and juxtapose them against what the extrinsic evidence says. You might even consider the (shocking, to some) premise that behind their survival masks, the people of North Korea are as just as human as we are.