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Category: Media Criticism

June 8, 2020

The N.Y. Times, the Ningpo 12, Minbyun & Yoon Mee-hyang: The Story Behind the Story

Warning: This one is a long read. There are a lot of threads to pull together. In the end, I believe the implications for South Korea’s democracy, the human rights of North Koreans, and the accuracy of the news you read are grave enough to justify the effort to write (and hopefully, to read) it. ~   ~   ~ Since the announcement of their group defection in April 2016, this blog has paid close attention to the case of the Ningpo...
Categories Defectors/Human Trafficking/Korean War II/Media Criticism/Refugees/Subversion/The Fifth Column
April 3, 2019

S. Korea’s ruling party thinks Korean journalists must “contribute to peaceful reunification, national reconciliation & the restoration of national homogeneity”

I often reflect on how life has been kind to me lately. Once, I was poor and cold; now, I live in comfort and warmth. Once, I struggled to eat enough; now, I struggle to eat less. Once, life was enclosed in the ennui of poverty, isolation, and the prospect of a life lived in dullness and pointlessness; now, life is endlessly interesting. Once, I was alienated and alone; now, I come home to my best friends, including the two...
Categories Censorship/Media Criticism
April 24, 2018

Will the real Im Jong-seok please speak up?

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, AS IF TO ANSWER THE QUESTION I RAISED in the final paragraph of yesterday’s post, reports on the background of South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s Chief of Staff, Im Jong-seok, or rather, some of it. It’s an unsatisfying report by first-rate reporters that reads as if it has been edited too heavily by lawyers. Its most glaring omissions are the word “Chondaehyop,” what it did, or when Im led it. Specifically, it fails to answer the questions that I’ve been...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Korean Politics/Media Criticism/The Fifth Column
October 11, 2017

How the U.S. fishing industry can do its part to disarm Kim Jong-un

Long-time readers know that I’ve had many uncomplimentary things to say about the Associated Press’s North Korea coverage. Its still-undisclosed agreements with the North Korean government to open a bureau in Pyongyang sacrificed journalistic ethics for a dubious dividend of access. Since opening its bureau in 2012, AP and its state-supplied North Korean stringers have reported a great deal of North Korean government propaganda and almost no actual news, while ignoring major news stories (to include a hotel fire, a...
Categories AP Watch/Human Trafficking/Media Criticism/Sanctions/U.S. Law
September 8, 2017

Buzzfeed is out of its depth on Egypt and North Korea sanctions

If journalism can be reduced to its most fundamental purpose, that purpose is to tell the reader important things he does not know. Be mindful of this purpose as we review one example of the slapdash reporting one tends to see whenever North Korea intrudes into the headlines. As the Trump administration scrambles to respond to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, it is trying to coax the country’s smaller trading partners, from Sudan to the Philippines, to ramp up the pressure...
Categories Arms Trafficking/Fiskings/Media Criticism/Sanctions
September 5, 2017

Kim Jong-Un’s Moonshadow Policy is eclipsing free thought in S. Korea, and beyond

As we begin rehashing the time-worn policy arguments about responding to a nuclear North Korea, it’s useful to inform those arguments with further evidence of just how Pyongyang is leveraging its nuclear hegemony, by escalating its control over speech in South Korea. Last week, a few of us noticed that KCNA published a “death sentence” against four journalists (two reviewers and two newspaper presidents) over a review of “North Korea Confidential” by James Pearson and Daniel Tudor, asserting further that...
Categories Books & Films/Censorship/Korean War II/Media Criticism/Terrorism (NK)
April 25, 2017

Minjok Tongshin is just Stormfront for pro-Pyongyang Koreans

It’s not worth spending all that much time discussing Minjok Tongshin, despite the fact that when Pyongyang’s official “news” agency, KCNA, talks about an “internet newspaper of Koreans in the U.S.,” odds are it’s referring to Minjok Tongshin, the smaller western cousin of the Korean-American National Coordinating Council. Recently, the site’s proprietor, Ken Roh, or Roh Kil-nam was the subject of a not-very-sympathetic portrayal by Buzzfeed. You may not think NK News’s more recent interview of Roh was exactly sympathetic, but it certainly...
Categories Media Criticism/Useful Idiocy
February 16, 2017

Dear New York Times: This is why your North Korea reporting stinks

I often say that the New York Times consistently has the worst North Korea coverage of any major U.S. newspaper. Next time someone asks me why that is, I suppose I’ll point them to this story by Jane Perlez, Choe Sang-hun and Motoko Rich, which could be the exemplar of everything that’s wrong with it in a single hyperlink. It was forwarded to me by an experienced journalist who writes for another major newspaper, and who probably wouldn’t want me to...
Categories Fiskings/Media Criticism
November 14, 2016

No, Newt Gingrich did not call for us to invade Iran and North Korea

It’s faint praise to say that Newt Gingrich would likely be an improvement over John Kerry as Secretary of State. I hardly count myself as Gingrich’s greatest fan. He’s intelligent and qualified for the job, and he certainly has grand policy visions, although I’d have concerns about putting a man of his ego and temperament into the nation’s top diplomatic position. I also think he’d have more trouble than Bob Corker or even John Bolton in his efforts to bend...
Categories Media Criticism
October 28, 2016

A study in media bias: Clapper said N. Korea diplomacy, not denuclearization, is a “lost cause.”

Earlier this week, I agreed with what James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, actually said about North Korea, before I criticized Clapper for saying it. Now, it’s the media’s turn. Media, if you’re reading this, most of you did an awful job reporting that story. Semantics are your business, so I’m going to get semantic here, starting with Clapper’s full quote, in context. All emphasis mine: Q: You talked about the assessment of threat in North Korea. I’m curious...
Categories Media Criticism
October 13, 2016

Leo Byrne is (almost) single-handedly destroying North Korea’s smuggling fleet

The other night, I was chatting with a reader who was surprised to hear me praise NK News. Although I consider Chad O’Carroll a friend, it’s no secret that Chad and I have philosophical differences about North Korea policy. Some of the things I read at NK News make me roll my eyes; others drive me to paroxysms of rage. But what I can never say about NK News is that it pulls punches. Its decision to publish Nate Thayer’s...
Categories Africa/Media Criticism/Shipping sanctions
August 24, 2016

If North Korea can make fake Viagra for export, why can’t it make TB drugs for sick North Koreans?

Since the collapse of North Korea’s nominally free public health system, contagious diseases have spread widely, but only a lucky few North Koreans have been able to find medicine and medical care. Most of its people get by on whatever health care they can afford and whatever drugs they can find. A lucky few use retired doctors or doctors who moonlight after regular working hours. Some pay steep bribes to get access to care and medicine in state hospitals and clinics....
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Health & Disease/Media Criticism
May 6, 2016

No Pyongyang Spring this year, either

The reasons why North Korea is holding a party congress are still a matter of conjecture to those of us fortunate enough not to live there. The congress is almost certainly related to Kim Jong-un’s consolidation of power in some way. It will probably reinforce the personality cult. The regime’s organization charts and wiring diagrams may be rearranged. Pessimists suspect that there will be more bloody purges or another nuclear test. Optimists still hold hope that His Corpulency will validate...
Categories Kim Jong Un/Kremlinology/Media Criticism
October 27, 2015

Was it worth it?

Right now, somewhere in North Korea, agents of the Ministry of People’s Security and State Security Department have just finished reading this article, and are making plans to comb selected areas of His Corpulency’s kingdom for every person who might have had contact with the Christian NGO Humanitarian International Services Group, or HISG, during the years that it operated in North Korea. Yesterday, The Intercept reported that the Pentagon funneled money to HISG, which smuggled Bibles into North Korea in false compartments...
Categories Media Criticism
October 26, 2015

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...
Categories Media Criticism
October 15, 2015

Associated Press holds another N. Korean propaganda exhibit, this time in Pyongyang

In 2011, the AP and the North Korean government’s main mouthpiece, the Korean Central News Agency, signed two memoranda of understanding. One of these memoranda allowed the AP to set up a bureau in Pyongyang, staffed in part by North Korean “journalists” from KCNA. The other provided for a joint commemorative photo exhibit by the AP and KCNA in a New York art gallery, “Marking 100 Years Since the Birth of Kim Il Sung.” That exhibit portrayed North Korea as a land of cherubic babies,...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
June 25, 2015

Stephens didn’t call for isolation, he called for objectivity and full disclosure (updated).

The Washington Post’s Anna Fifield has written an opinion piece in response to Bret Stephen’s column yesterday, on which I commented in yesterday’s post: If we can’t report from the gulag without a guide, by Stephens’s logic, then we shouldn’t be reporting from North Korea at all. Or from Iran, or Syria, or Gaddafi’s Libya or probably present-day China, where journalists are closely monitored. Certainly not from the Soviet Union before the Iron Curtain came down. Whenever we journalists go...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism