Category: AP Watch

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...

For nearly 20 years now, proponents of “engagement” with North Korea have promised that commerce, aid, and economic interdependence would expose the North to new ideas and transform it into a more open society.  The reality has been much closer to the opposite of this.  Buoyed by a stream of regime-sustaining hard currency, North Korea became (if anything) more belligerent toward its benefactors, more brazen in its proliferation, and more brutal and exploitative toward its own people. Meanwhile, those in...

The Wall Street Journal has printed an edited version of AP flack Paul Colford’s letter to the editor. You might think that reading and writing would be core competencies for a news service media-relations type, but Colford still seems not to have read the op-ed carefully, and his writing has all the clarity of a back-page legal notice. Here’s a link to the letter and my response. I continue to believe that the op-ed was accurate, and the failure of...

Well, if this doesn’t symbolize everything, I don’t know what else does. AP President Tom Curley does the “honors,” if that’s quite the right word here. Some of them look slightly uncomfortable about it, to be sure. It’s de rigeur for visitors to North Korea to have to lay flowers and bow at these statues, as a first conditioning act of self-subordination. What’s less clear is that it’s de rigeur to agree to do this on camera. North Korea’s own...

… about the AP’s North Korea coverage. See it before it vanishes behind the pay wall. Click the image to go there. The title is cute; I wish I could take credit for it. UPDATE: The empire has struck back. I will let the e-mails tell the story, omitting names because I’m not interested in dragging the AWSJ or WSJ people into this individually, as pretextual and cowardly as I think their actions were. I’m fairly certain this email exchange...

Wow. That’s so perfectly suited to the occasion, I wish I’d thought of it first. If this award were only open to bureau chiefs of major news services who, while stationed in the capitals of repressive Stalinist dictatorships, faithfully followed the party line — that all was feast and plenty while millions were on the brink of starvation just a few miles away — why, the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau would win this by default. Judging by her Twitter feed, Bureau...

Recently, the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau has produced thankfully little of the reprocessed KCNA propaganda that caused me to set up my AP Watch category. It’s still not too much to hope that the AP will cease to deceive its readers by reporting stage-managed propaganda as news, or as an accurate portrayal of life in North Korea. The next weeks will tell us whether this trend will persist, and whether the AP’s corporate management has any shame.  They have invested a...

Until last week, the Associated Press and the North Korean regime had co-sponsored a photo exhibition in New York to commemorate the lives and legacies of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The exhibition appears to have been one of North Korea’s demands of the AP, part of a deal in which the AP secured permission to open a bureau in Pyongyang. I had previously posted some samples of the exhibition here and here, confirming that the photos exhibited...

I think we’ve just reached the point at which reality is just too absurd for parody, so I’ll just let you read the latest and judge for yourself. Somehow, I don’t think comparing Kim Jong Il’s birth to the nativity at Bethlehem is quite the angle KCNA should have chosen to win over the hearts and minds of middle America. I would, however, like to commend Jean H. Lee for (1) putting her byline on the story, (2) helpfully acknowledging...

There are days when this blog almost writes itself: PYONGYANG, North Korea — North Korean students in Pyongyang celebrated the first day of their new school year this week with flowers and confetti. It’s a moment marked by ceremony for students entering a school for the first time, whether it’s primary school, a university or something in between. It’s a tradition for the parents of primary school students to pin flowers on their new school uniforms. At middle school, older...

Hey Chico, thanks for the links! So for those of you who are reading about the special relationship between the Associated Press and the North Korean government for the first time, let me frame the question this way: if any news service signed an agreement with the U.S. government to get special access to information, refused to disclose the terms of that agreement, issued a series of credulous and biased articles (and at least one faked photo) relaying The Official...