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October 28, 2014

Associated Press perestroika watch

The AP’s Pyongyang Bureau Chief, Eric Talmadge, has managed to coax the AP’s business partners at KCNA into letting him and photographer David Guttenfelder travel from Pyongyang to Mt. Paektu in the far north, by car. Having been duly warned not to got lost—or “you will be shot”—Talmadge and his minder stocked up on fuel coupons, Evian, and Skippy, and headed off toward Wonsan. Even on the loneliest of lonely highways, we would never be without a “minder,” whose job was...
Categories AP Watch
October 3, 2014

New Focus: No one in or out of Pyongyang (updated)

The report is now a few days old, and I’m curious to know whether this can be confirmed by anyone else, and whether this has changed since it was published. North Korea restricted entry and exit permissions to Pyongyang three days ago, a New Focus correspondent reports. The source could not confirm whether this move was related to Kim Jong-un’s disappearance from the public eye for the past 26 days. On the ground, the measure is informally being suggested to...
Categories AP Watch/Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology
September 26, 2014

Kim Jong Un is sick, another purge may have begun, and …. Oh, look! AP has an exclusive report from Pyongyang on ladies’ footwear!

Jesus wept. The U.N. is debating North Korea’s crimes against humanity, state TV admits that Kim Jong Un is “not feeling well,” his Number Two, Chae Ryong Hae, was just removed from his post, and the Comcast of Journalism brings us this exclusive report from Derek Zoolander: While rubber boots and utilitarian flats remain the norm elsewhere in North Korea, high heels in a wide array of colors and styles are commonplace in Pyongyang. They range from basic black to glittery sequined styles...
Categories AP Watch
September 22, 2014

North Korea ranks 197th out of 197 countries for press freedom this year,

… according to Freedom House. Remember 2011, when Pyongyang’s deal with the Associated Press was supposed to usher in a new era of press freedom in North Korea? Wouldn’t it be great if one of the AP’s editors or correspondents would sit for an interview, review how that’s worked out, and answer hard questions about the North Korean regime’s restrictions on the access and coverage? I don’t mean softball interviews like this; I mean the kind of hard questions that make...
Categories AP Watch/Censorship/Media Criticism
September 14, 2014

Travel in N. Korea “feels incredibly safe,” says tour company whose customer just got 6 years hard labor.

In a proceeding that took just 90 minutes — about as long as most arraignments I’ve done — North Korea’s “Supreme Court” has sentenced American tourist Matthew Todd Miller to six years of hard labor for “entering the country illegally and trying to commit espionage.” The AP omits the State Department’s easily accessible finding that North Korea’s “judiciary was not independent and did not provide fair trials,” but adds the amusing detail that Miller waived his right to a North Korean lawyer....
Categories AP Watch/Foreigners in N. Korea/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law
August 18, 2014

Also, Rimjin-gang did it better seven months ago, so there’s that.

Eric Talmadge, the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau Chief, denied the opportunity to do reporting of the apartment collapse story by his North Korean hosts and partners last May, offers an honest assessment of the unknowns as the next best thing, three months after the fact. Despite Talmadge’s obviously earnest effort, he doesn’t quite succeed, but least he’s willing to raise some hard questions about North Korea’s construction boom: In a country that sorely needs to improve its basic infrastructure, there is no public debate over whether North...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
July 4, 2014

How can NK News cover Pyongyang better than AP’s Pyongyang bureau?

Chad O’Carroll of NK News has managed to collect enough photographs of that collapsed Pyongyang apartment building – all taken from the Juche Tower over a five-week period – to narrow the time of the collapse down to half a day. O’Carroll’s finding actually confirms KCNA’s official account of the time of the collapse, and as O’Carroll admits, also refutes his initial skepticism of that account. O’Carroll has even created and published a .gif animation of these photographs, in which the ill-fated building vanishes from...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
June 11, 2014

Some advice for AFP, on the opening of its Pyongyang bureau

A reader (thank you) forwards me this French-language article indicating that Agence France-Presse will soon ink its own deal to open a bureau in Pyongyang. I’m sorry to have disappointed this reader by not expressing immediate and ferocious opposition to this, but then, I wasn’t opposed to the AP opening a bureau when it was first announced, either. I became opposed to AP’s experiment when I began to see troubling signs like this, and especially this. My opposition — and my...
Categories AFP Watch/AP Watch
May 18, 2014

If a building falls in Pyongyang and AP doesn’t hear it, why the fuck is it even there?

This weekend, we hear news of a terrible tragedy in Pyongyang, the collapse of a 23-story apartment building in the central Phyongchon District. The building was still under construction, but apparently, North Koreans move into apartment buildings before the construction is completed. Sources in South Korea’s Unification Ministry told Reuters that hundreds may have died, and KCNA’s expression of “profound consolation and apology … to bereaved families” seems to corroborate that there were many dead. KCNA says the accident “claimed casualties,” but doesn’t...
Categories AP Watch/Inside NK/Media Criticism
May 7, 2014

Really? North Korea called President Obama “a wicked black monkey”? (Update: It’s worse than that; Update 2, now with full translation)

Oh, yes they did: Park made waste water-like reckless remarks slandering the DPRK’s line on simultaneously developing two fronts after inviting her American master reminiscent of a wicked black monkey to visit south Korea on April 25…. The people are unanimous in deploring the fact that there is no remedy for curing Park’s mental disease as she has gone so mad with hurling mud at the nuclear deterrence of justice which the fellow countrymen in the north have had access...
Categories AP Watch/Diplomacy/Racism/WTF?
April 3, 2014

AP outraged about free speech in Cuba

Is the AP a cabal of closet Marxist-Leninists or just the supine courtesan of every tyrant who lets it open a bureau in his kingdom? Either way, I really don’t understand what drives its corporate conscience. On one hand, it recently criticized the Obama Administration for “propaganda” photos. On the other hand, it did this not long after putting on an exhibition of actual propaganda photos of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Now, the AP has released a breathless...
Categories AP Watch/Censorship/Subversion
December 13, 2013

AP protests “propaganda” photos of Obama after sponsoring propaganda photos of Kim Il Sung.

[UPDATE: Welcome, Weekly Standard readers.] The Associated Press, which in 2012 co-sponsored “A Joint Exhibition by the Associated Press and the Korean Central News Agency Marking 100 Years Since the Birth of Kim Il Sung,” is furious at the White House for using official photographers (rather than independent photojournalists) to “propagate an idealized portrayal of events on Pennsylvania Avenue.” Writing in the pages of The New York Times, Santiago Lyon, Vice President and Director of Photography at The Associated Press, assails...
Categories AP Watch
October 25, 2013

Early signs are good for the new AP Pyongyang.

So I finally found a minute to read Tim Sullivan’s piece in National Geographic, and it’s actually quite good: In the parking lot, though, as we slid open the door to the van that ferries us everywhere, the monks reappeared. A minder was beside them. All looked at us expectantly. Then the older monk spoke. “I know what you want to ask,” Zang Hye Myong said. Suddenly it was obvious why the monks had followed us. Minders do not introduce...
Categories Anju Links/AP Watch
October 20, 2013

At Foreign Policy, AP’s Jean Lee takes a parting shot at OFK (Updated)

Frankly, I’m glad to see someone at the AP begin to address my criticisms on their substance, even if the hardest questions went unasked. The original article at Foreign Policy is here. Below is my response, as posted in the comments, with one typo corrected. I wish the author of this article had offered me an opportunity to comment or respond, because there’s much that the article left unsaid. In any event, I’d like to offer FP’s readers a better...
Categories AP Watch
October 16, 2013

AP’s new Bureau Chief should tell us: Are these kids dead or alive?*

Last night, a reader forwarded me AP’s announcement that it had replaced Jean Lee as Bureau Chief in both Seoul and Pyongyang. The new Bureau Chief in Pyongyang will be Eric Talmadge, whose name is absent from the vast OFK archives, and whose reputation is thus a blank slate. The AP has also caught up with the spirit of ’45 by appointing a separate Bureau Chief for Seoul, Foster Klug. Klug’s name is one of the best known in Korea...
Categories AP Watch/Refugees
August 10, 2013

AP Vice President Celebrates Great Fatherland Liberation War!

One of my favorite media experiments is to observe different reporters with different biases cover similar stories in very different ways. The anniversary of the end of the Korean War was our most recent occasion for this experiment, and Pyongyang was our petri dish.  Not surprisingly for regular readers of this blog, reporters who were merely visiting Pyongyang covered it very differently from reporters beholden to its regime by business and professional entanglements.  One perspective tells a story of former...
Categories AP Watch
March 9, 2013

What would you ask the AP?

The AP is hosting an event on social media in North Korea, with the AP’s Eric Carvin and its Korea Bureau Chief, Jean H. Lee.  Thanks to the readers who let me know. The conversation was dead — no one seemed all that interested the AP’s views on social media amid the re-declaration of Korean War II — so I decided to stimulate a livelier discussion by asking whether the AP will ever reveal its agreements with KCNA, whether it pays...
Categories AP Watch