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March 1, 2013

Say, do you think Kim Jong Un might just be a complete doofus who happens to have nuclear weapons?

SO THE FIRST WELL-KNOWN AMERICAN to meet with Kim Jong Un is not an AP interviewer, a tribute-bearing Bill Richardson, a ransom-bearing Jimmy Carter, or first choice Michael Jordan.  It is this man: Strain, if you must, to make this into some sort of soft power diplomatic coup; it really looks like a tragic sequel to “Being There.” The very weirdness of it all is evident in some priceless exchanges from yesterday’s State Department daily press briefing. Delectably, the AP’s part-time Pyongyang...
Categories AP Watch/Kim Jong Un/WTF?
February 14, 2013

AP Exclusive! North Korea’s nuke test a cry for peace

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — AP Pyongyang has all the logic and perspective of KCNA Pyongyang and none of the guilty pleasures of KCNA’s prose.   The way North Korea sees it, only bigger weapons and more threatening provocations will force Washington to come to the table to discuss what Pyongyang says it really wants: peace. [….] North Korea has long cited the U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, and what it considers a...
Categories AP Watch/WMD
February 13, 2013

Open Sources, Feb. 13, 2013: Special Non-Nuclear Edition

I’D BEEN SAVING UP some anju links for later this week, but in light of the latest nuke test, I’m going to just clear the decks now.  First, in response to J’s request, I set up an e-mail subscription feature.  Tell me how that’s working for you. *          *          * AP WATCH, PT. 1.  The AP’s Vice President admits, in effect, that the only thing AP has gotten access to is the regime’s...
Categories Anju Links/AP Watch
January 21, 2013

Teenage girl’s blog post more interesting, informative, and balanced than AP Bureau Chief’s report.

Nate Thayer does it again.  Don’t miss this one: Why then did an amateur teenage college student accompanying her father on the same Google trip deliver a knockout blow in her blog posting of the high profile top world story, putting to shame with substance, detail,  quotations from key participants, color, and written presentation the entire AP Korea coverage, despite the AP Pyongyang Bureau Chief, Ms Jean H. Lee being physically present at every event of the 4 day visit,...
Categories AP Watch
January 18, 2013

AP VP denies N. Korean censorship, says he’s being treated well, confesses to “brigandish madcap war crimes.”

“KIM JONG” BILL RICHARDSON’S FIXER, TONY NAMKUNG, is one of those people who is so thoroughly despised by some North Korea watchers that they hesitate to express their views without consulting their lawyers. I know I should explain, but I haven’t consulted my lawyer. Instead, I’ll again refer you to this piece by Nir Rosen that paints Namkung in an unflattering light (without even seeming to try to do so).  This week, Don Kirk convinces me that I don’t care much for Tony Namkung, either:...
Categories AP Watch
January 15, 2013

Daniszewski in Pyongyang for AP Bureau’s Anniversary

Today’s installment comes to us from KNCA, no less: “John Daniszewski, vice president of the Associated Press of the United States, and his party arrived here by air on Monday.” Yes, that’s the entire story. Yonhap also picks up the story, but has little to add. I suppose Daniszewski could have flown all the way to Pyongyang to ask KCNA to take his picture off its website, but I have to suspect that he’s there for more substantive discussions about...
Categories AP Watch
January 12, 2013

Open Sources, Jan. 12, 2013

AP WATCH:  Judging by his bio and his Wikipedia page, Nate Thayer is one of the most cantankerous and accomplished freelance journalists of our time. I was going to write about some of the things Jean Lee didn’t say in her report about Eric Schmidt’s visit to Pyongyang, but Thayer beat me to it and saved me the trouble. Contrast Lee’s work to this, from David Chance and Park Ju-Min of Reuters. Has opening a bureau in Pyongyang made the AP’s journalism better or worse? Lee...
Categories Anju Links/AP Watch
January 7, 2013

Open Sources, January 7, 2013

AP EXECUTIVES ON KCNA’S NEW FRONT PAGE! Like OFK, KCNA has made some changes to its web page. (In my own case, a hack attack led me to upgrade and update, which fixed the mysterious problem with the menu that had frustrated me for months — thanks, pro-North Korean hackers!)  In KCNA’s case, their header now features (directly above His Porcine Majesty) Tom Curley, the AP’s now-retired CEO, and John Danizewski, its Vice President and Senior Managing Editor: If George Orwell...
Categories Anju Links/AP Watch
January 4, 2013

Can Tim Sullivan Save the Associated Press from KCNA?

If anything comes of the Richardson-Schmidt visit to Pyongyang, Jean Lee will be the first foreign journalist to break the story of the visit.  Huzzah for her, then, because Ms. Lee desperately needs to show that AP can report anything from Pyongyang that is (a) true, (b) newsworthy, and (c) exclusive to justify the existence of her new bureau.  Still, I’d nominate Lee’s exclusive coverage of the opening of Kim Jong Il’s mausoleum as her magnum opus, apparently filed from some...
Categories AP Watch
December 13, 2012

AP Exclusive: 100% of North Koreans interviewed by other North Koreans in a bar in Pyongyang applaud missile launch!

According to an exclusive, groundbreaking AP report from the frontier of journalism — Pyongyang — 100% of North Korean citizens interviewed by other North Koreans in a bar support Great Leader Kim Jong Un’s completely successful launch of a peaceful satellite despite the hostile policy of the imperialist Barack Obama! In Pyongyang, however, pride over the scientific advancement outweighed the fear of greater international isolation and punishment. North Korea, though struggling to feed its people, is now one of the...
Categories AP Watch
November 30, 2012

So … does this mean KCNA believes in unicorns?

America’s finest news source, The Onion, is presented as parody but can be mistaken for reality. North Korea’s finest news source, KCNA, is presented as reality but can be mistaken for parody. But if you compare the best work of each news source, KCNA is clearly funnier: Pyongyang, November 29 (KCNA) — Archaeologists of the History Institute of the DPRK Academy of Social Sciences have recently reconfirmed a lair of the unicorn rode by King Tongmyong, founder of the Koguryo Kingdom...
Categories AP Watch/Unintended Humor/WTF?
October 11, 2012

Yes, even AP reporters can do good reporting from North Korea

Finally.  An AP reporter goes to North Korea and puts the showpieces of Pyongyang into the context of how people in the rest of North Korea live.  Naturally, the reporter is Tim Sullivan. There are no nightspots here, no modern apartment complexes, no electricity except for a few hours every evening. The shelves in most stores are noticeably half-empty, and dirt sidestreets lead to clusters of small houses, many little more than shacks, with bulging walls and broken roofs. It...
Categories AP Watch
September 27, 2012

Open Sources, September 27, 2012: AP Watch Special Edition

MY MY, LOOK WHAT slipped out of the memory hole. Double plus odd. ——————————————– SO THIS POST SEEMS TO HAVE TRIGGERED a Twitter skirmish between reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post on one side, and the AP on the other. It all starts when the NYT’s Hiroko Tabuchi, retweeting my post, says, “Time-old trap: offer of access -> controlled info,” and then tweets that another Jean H. Lee story “does read a bit like KNCA .....
Categories AP Watch
September 25, 2012

North Korean Reform Watch 6

We don’t know how extensive North Korea’s agricultural reforms are meant to be, but we do know that North Korea wants us to think that it’s instituting big reforms in its agricultural sector, because it took the AP’s Jean Lee on a show tour of a collective where the “farmers” were primed to tell her it was so. Is it too cynical of me to tend to disbelieve any fact that North Korea wants me to believe is true? Props...
Categories AP Watch/Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
September 24, 2012

Washington Post report exposes AP’s North Korea disinformation

Let’s take stock of what the AP has accomplished in the year-plus since it announced those agreements with North Korea — the ones it still hasn’t disclosed — to open a bureau in Pyongyang.  It disseminated at least one faked photo globally; co-sponsored a Kim Il Sung propaganda exhibition in Manhattan with North Korea’s official “news” service; invited two North Korean propagandists into its news team; and provided us a stream of leash-and-collar journalism that repackages North Korean propaganda with...
Categories AP Watch
August 10, 2012

Suddenly, Ri Sol Ju’s Fashion is the AP’s Blind Spot

What Blaine Harden calls North Korea’s extreme makeover has suffered a severe setback: North Korea’s young first lady has been pictured sporting what appears to be a Christian Dior handbag, in stark contrast to widespread shortages elsewhere in the impoverished nation. Ri Sol-Ju, the wife of leader Kim Jong-Un, was pictured accompanying him on a “field guidance trip” to an army unit. It was unclear whether the bag was genuine or an imitation. South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper said Wednesday...
Categories AP Watch/Kim Jong Un
August 3, 2012

AP Watch: Columbia Journalism Review Misses the Opportunity to Review Journalism

I’ve been waiting for The Columbia Journalism Review to inquire into the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau, so imagine my disappointment to see them interview Korea (and Pyongyang) Bureau Chief Jean H. Lee and squander that opportunity by lobbing softballs.  I mean, seriously, not one question about this?  Not one probing question about the AP’s MOUs with the North Korean government? (Psst.  They have a comments section.) The AP-KCNA experiment continues to be failure nonetheless.  Seven months later, the AP sits in...
Categories AP Watch
July 23, 2012

North Korea Increases Public Executions and Collective Punish…. Hey, Look! It’s Snoopy!

Writing in The Washington Post, Chico Harlan reports that as North Koreans try to flee its most recent avoidable food crisis, the repressive partnership of North Korea and China has been grimly effective in keeping North Koreans from escaping from their prison of a country: Last year, 2,706 North Koreans came to the South. During the first half of this year, there have been only 751 — a 42 percent decline compared with the same period a year earlier. The...
Categories AP Watch/Kim Jong Un/Refugees