Home  >  Media Criticism

Category: Media Criticism

August 12, 2013

The Daily NK: Keeping the promises that the Sunshine Policy couldn’t

In a land of scarcity, North Korea’s scarcest commodity is truth, and it is truth that is transforming North Korea.  In the last ten years, North Korea’s death-grip on the flow of food, consumer goods, and information across its borders was fractured, and probably for good.  This change is enormously consequential to how we ought to approach North Korea.  Even as inter-governmental “Sunshine” and engagement failed decisively–and probably exacerbated North Korea’s brutality–market-based engagement and information flows have been profoundly transformative....
Categories Activism/Media Criticism
August 4, 2013

Giving Back to the Daily NK: Amplify the North Korea Info Flow

The Daily NK has provided us North Korea watchers for the last 8.5 years with big scoops like the currency “reform” of late 2009 and lots of smaller stories that further our understanding of everyday life in North Korea. Last month they launched their outreach campaign to the international community with a Nightout and a Meetup in Seoul, and this month they’re doing their first crowdsourcing campaign (click image above). Traditionally, charitable giving was not practiced in Korean society. As...
Categories Media Criticism
July 3, 2013

#NIGHTOUT with Daily NK: Support Free Media in North Korea

Joshua’s still away, but this is a first attempt at getting back to posting at least occasionally here. — Dan Bielefeld Even infrequent readers of One Free Korea will recognize the important role the Daily NK plays in deepening and broadening our understanding of North Korea. For those of you in Seoul, I hope you can come out Friday night in Itaewon for their first “Nightout.” For everyone else, why not send them a few bucks with an online donation....
Categories Inside NK/Media Criticism
July 2, 2012

Sure, he’s shooting a lot more people, but their widows have cuter shoes!

ABC’s Joohee Choe has written the single dumbest, most superficial thing about North Korea ever to dress itself in drag as journalism. Attempting to forge a new image for himself and his country, North Korea’s youthful supreme leader Kim Jong Un is allowing women to wear pants, platform shoes and earrings, making more mobile phones available, endorsing previously banned foods like pizza, French fries and hamburgers — and he’s giving kids free trips to zoos and amusement parks. The 20-something...
Categories Media Criticism
April 15, 2012

Who Else Flubbed N. Korea’s Rocket Launch? The Press, the U.N., and the Obama Administration

By now, everyone knows that the North’s missile test was a fiasco, but North Koreans don’t have this fiasco all to themselves. For example, until the day of the launch, the North had never done a better of job handling of the foreign press. It had successfully co-opted the largest wire service in the United States into a megaphone for its propaganda, and it had so effectively focused much of the rest of the U.S. media on its stage-managed rocket...
Categories "United" Nations/AP Watch/Media Criticism/Missiles
April 11, 2012

White House Warns Media Not to Be Tools for North Korean Propaganda

They didn’t mention the AP specifically, but they didn’t really have to: The White House is pushing back against the media for what it sees as oversaturated coverage of this week’s forthcoming North Korean missile test. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know this is a propaganda exercise,” National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told me. “Reporters have to be careful not to get co-opted. The long-range missile test, which Pyongyang is touting as a peaceful satellite...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
March 22, 2012

Irony Alert: North Korea Reveals the Truth about the Associated Press and Human Rights Watch (Updated)

I’d like to interrupt my advocacy of the violent overthrow of the North Korean government to thank the Korea Central News Agency, North Korea’s official “news” service, for being so much more transparent than the Associated Press has been about the new relationship between the two agencies. For the last few weeks, I’ve made a personal jihad of obtaining photographic proof that the joint photo exhibit by the AP and KCNA, which opened this week in New York, is not...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
March 10, 2012

Wanted: Photos & Video of AP’s Kim Il Sung Glorification Exhibit in New York (Updated with Location, Hours, Photos)

Yonhap is reporting that the Kim Il Sung commemorative photo exhibit to be co-sponsored by the Associated Press and the official North Korean “news” service, will open next Thursday: A group of North Korean journalists left for the United States Saturday to attend a photo exhibition set to open next week, marking the centenary of the birth of the North’s late founding leader, Kim Il-sung, the country’s media said. The North’s delegation, led by Kim Chang-gwang, vice director of the...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
March 6, 2012

WTF? AP and KCNA co-sponsor “Day of the Sun” Kim Il Sung propaganda exhibit in New York?

Ever since the Associated Press signed an MOU with North Korea’s official “news” agency establishing a bureau in Pyongyang, I’ve tracked a disturbing trend in the AP’s coverage, starting with its global distribution of a doctored photograph designed to finagle food aid out of potential donors. The other day, the latest in a series of reports echoing KCNA’s propaganda caused me to say that it had turned its AP propaganda amplifier up to eleven. In retrospect, I should have saved...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
January 20, 2012

Global news agency being held hostage in North Korea.

The dalliance between the Associated Press and the Korean Central News Agency, the world’s most mendacious news agency, has already fathered the global distribution of doctored photographs and some awfully dubious journalism by its correspondent, Jean H. Lee — and transmitted all of it to hundreds of millions of news consumers around the world. Recall that last summer, just after the AP first signed a joint distribution agreement with KCNA, the AP distributed this photograph of a flood in North...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
December 30, 2011

KCNA caught doctoring photos again

Yet again, KCNA, the world’s least reputable news agency, has been caught providing a foreign news agency with a doctored photo, and said foreign news agency went to print with it and had to kill it. The alteration is not dramatic; instead, it is so casual as to suggest that to KCNA, this sort of thing is no big deal.  Take a look at the small group of stragglers to the left of the orderly formations along the street.  As...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
July 26, 2011

Questions Unasked

Just days after the AP fell victim to a photo hoax by KCNA, the official North Korean “news” agency it partnered up with, the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau Chief, Jean H. Lee, seems not to have taken to heart that “journalist” does not mean in North Korea what it means in other places: But this year, David and I have been granted unprecedented access as part of AP’s efforts to expand its coverage of North Korea. We traveled into the countryside,...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
July 20, 2011

At least the News of the World didn’t publish doctored North Korean photographs

It’s hard to take at face value the public ostracizing of Rupert Murdoch as a cancer within journalism even as the world’s two foremost wire services have just associated themselves with the world’s most fraudulent news organization. I refer to the AP’s announcement late last month that it had made a deal with Kim Jong Il’s own Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) to open a bureau in Pyongyang, and the more recent announcement by Reuters that it had “expanded” its...
Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
July 9, 2011

Kevin Dawes in Libya

Now, here’s someone who really deserves more traffic. Kevin Dawes, a “freelance battlefield journalist” from San Diego, reports from the middle of an artillery barrage east of Misrata, Libya, via his YouTube channel. Some of Dawes’s videos were uploaded as recently as two hours ago, but this was taken the day before yesterday: This kind of micro-reporting won’t give you the war’s broader context — something that’s often inaccurately reported in any event — but following Dawes’s channel makes you...
Categories Media Criticism
November 7, 2010

The Reaper Comes for Cho Myong Rok

Top North Korean military official Jo Myong Rok, a longtime confidant of leader Kim Jong Il who traveled to Washington in 2000 on a then-unprecedented goodwill mission, has died. He was 82. Jo, who was vice marshal of the Korean People’s Army and held the No. 2 post on the powerful National Defense Commission behind Kim, died Saturday of heart disease, the official Korean Central News Agency reported from Pyongyang. [AP, Hyun Jin Kim] Other experienced Asia hands will tell...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks
October 18, 2010

A Tale of Two Cities

Why does so much of the American reporting from North Korea make me wince? Because so often, the reporters are content to describe the facade without a peek behind the curtain. Take the case of CNN’s Alina Cho, who, contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, tells the Huffington Post how ebullient, well-fed, and prosperous Pyongyang is now that Kim Jong-Eun is ascending daddy’s throne: Even with these constraints, Cho said she noticed seemingly small changes during her four...
Categories Kim Jong Un/Media Criticism
July 20, 2010

“[W]e traveled with poison, so that if we were caught, we’d take it and kill ourselves.”

Sue Lloyd-Roberts continues her look at North Korea by interviewing refugees in Seoul and asking them about the images her minders allowed her to film. At 13:00, Lloyd-Roberts interviews Young Howard, a/k/a Ha Tae Kyung, the founder of Open Radio. She even sits in as he interviews a source by telephone. She seems to presume (incorrectly) that Ha is North Korean, but in fact, he’s a South Korean and a former leftist political prisoner. It’s both unsurprising and striking how...
Categories Inside NK/Media Criticism/Refugees/Useful Idiocy