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Category: Media Criticism

May 2, 2009

At The New Ledger: On the New Hostage Diplomacy

I have a new piece up at The New Ledger: As President Barack Obama basks in the adoration of the media, the captivity of three of their colleagues — one in Iran and two in North Korea — now looks very much like a calculated test of whether terrorism will be restored to its former place as a tolerated method of diplomacy. The new administration’s reaction thus far has seemed paralyzed and unprepared for the test that Joe Biden, after...
Categories Media Criticism/Terrorism/Iraq/U.S. Politics
April 23, 2009

Telling Half the Story at Yongbyon

The Washington Post reassures us that North Korea’s threat to restart plutonium processing is mostly empty because of the current condition of its 5-MW reaction. Not only do I agree that the reactor is probably a wreck, I believe that was also true before the North Koreans sold us their scrap heap for such a high price. Funny, I don’t remember Siegfried Hecker telling us that in 2007 when the State Department was telling us what a breakthrough this deal...
Categories Media Criticism/WMD
April 2, 2009

KCNA Stands Up for Press Freedom!

North Korea, which was ranked 172nd out of 173 countries on last year’s survey of world press freedom and which is currently holding two journalists hostage, has lent its moral authority to the oppressed purveyors of the fraudulent P.D. Diary in South Korea, which inspired last year’s violent mad cow demonstrations. The Citizens Federation for Democratic Media of south Korea issued a statement on March 27 denouncing the present “government” and the ruling party for their undisguised moves to put...
Categories Censorship/Media Criticism/Unintended Humor
April 1, 2009

Reporters Without Borders Petitions for the Release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee

Fittingly, Reporters Without Borders has launched an online petition for the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who are now facing a North Korean “trial” for allegedly crossing the border between China and North Korea. Regardless of which side of the border Ling and Lee were on, or your views about North Korea policy, every reasonable person should agree that holding Ling and Lee is unjustified; indeed, it’s clear that North Korea is holding them as “bargaining chips,” which...
Categories Activism/Human Rights/Media Criticism/Refugees
March 30, 2009

One Man’s “Bargaining Chip” Is Another Man’s Hostage

Update: Uh oh: Two American journalists detained at North Korea’s border with China two weeks ago will be indicted and tried, “their suspected hostile acts” already confirmed, Pyongyang’s state-run news agency said Tuesday. The Korean Central News Agency report did not say when a trial might take place, but said preparations to indict the Americans were under way as the investigation continues. “The illegal entry of U.S. reporters into the DPRK and their suspected hostile acts have been confirmed by...
Categories Media Criticism/Refugees/Terrorism (NK)
March 25, 2009

U.S. journalists under ‘intense interrogation’ in Pyongyang

This is the price a journalist pays for trying to report the truth about North Korea, away from the regime’s guided tours. The information about the whereabouts of Euna Lee and Laura Ling comes from South Korean “human intelligence” sources in the North, so don’t take this at face value: After being questioned at the security command, Lee and Ling were reportedly taken to Pyongyang last Wednesday. Each was put in a separate vehicle so that there would be no...
Categories Media Criticism/Refugees
March 19, 2009

North Korea Detains Two (?) U.S. Journalists

As you see, the reports conflict as to how many incidents there were, how many journalists were detained, and on which side of the border: Embedded video from CNN Video The preponderance of reports thus far suggest that two American journalists with the network Current TV were arrested — and if this is confirmed, it would be fair to say “abducted” — from the Chinese side of the Yalu River while filming North Korea. Two American journalists on a reporting...
Categories Abductions/Media Criticism/Refugees
February 10, 2009

KCNA Flays Flunkeyist U.S. Imperialist Newspaper’s Deceptive Headline!

“North Korea Tones Down Its Rhetoric” — N.Y. Times, Feb. 7, 2009 And here are some examples of the toned-down North Korea rhetoric we saw shortly thereafter: The frantic exercises staged by the Lee Myung Bak warlike forces who put the inter-Korean relations in total stalemate and drove the situation on the Korean Peninsula to the brink of war through their reckless anti-DPRK confrontational moves will only precipitate their ruin. — KCNA, Feb. 8, 2009 No one can predict what...
Categories Media Criticism
January 28, 2009

Kim Jong Il Still Unable to Hold Up a Current Newspaper

North Korea continues to want us to believe that Kim Jong Il is hale and healthy, and a surprising number of journalists continue to report the KCNA’s uncorroborated claims of his public appearances as “evidence” of his recovery: “When he appeared in the auditorium the audience broke into the stormy cheers of ‘Hurrah!’ and extended the warmest lunar New Year greetings to him,” KCNA said. While state media reported his appearance, they did not release any photos or footage of...
Categories Kim Jong Il/Media Criticism
January 22, 2009

Gullible’s Travels: The Selective Disbelief of Selig S. Harrison

Here’s the latest installment of North Korea’s hostile policy: The North Korean military declared an “all-out confrontational posture” against South Korea on Saturday as an American scholar said North Korean officials told him they had “weaponized” enough plutonium for roughly four or five nuclear bombs. American intelligence officials have previously estimated that the North had harvested enough fuel for six or more bombs, although it has never been clear whether the North constructed the weapons. The scholar, Selig S. Harrison,...
Categories Media Criticism/Proliferation/Washington Views/WMD
December 16, 2008

WaPo Finally ‘Discovers’ Concentration Camps in North Korea

I submit that any man so morally retarded that he would utter the statement quoted below is not qualified to represent the values or interests of the United States abroad. And South Korea isn’t alone in tuning out the horrors. The United States is more concerned with containing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. The State Department’s stunning lack of urgency was captured in a recent statement from its assistant secretary for Asia, Christopher R. Hill: “Each country, including our own, needs...
Categories Appeasement/Human Rights/Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks/The Camps
December 12, 2008

On North Korea, Bush has one last chance not to go out with a whimper.

In several ways, it would be a mistake to make too much of the New York Times’s declaration of the “collapse” of Agreed Framework 2.0, a/k/a the Not Quite Agreed Framework. The Times’s coverage of this story has never been particularly good, and its editorials have been ridiculously inconsistent. Clearly, The Times’s loathing of Bush did not dwell easily with its approval of Bush’s new willingness to excuse North Korea from every standard of human civilization. The Times saying so...
Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks
November 16, 2008

New Media Lead the Way in Covering North Korea

Interestingly, this tacit admission comes from the L.A. Times, no less. [Defector Zhu Sung-Ha, now a journalist] criticized South Korean intelligence for not getting inside the Pyongyang government. “The two Koreas have been at war for 60 years,” Zhu said, in reference to the state of war that has officially existed since the Korean War. “During that time they should have placed someone close to Kim. I am surprised their intelligence is so weak.” As a result, much of the...
Categories Inside NK/Media Criticism
August 25, 2008

We apologize again for the fault in this broadcast. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.

The shepherds of the mad sheep refuse to die quietly. MBC, which retracted its misleading report linking U.S. beef to mad cow disease under court order and apologized to its viewers, is now appealing that order.  So if it’s now beyond  serious dispute that the original report misled viewers with sloppy translations, bad science,  and images of people and cows infected with other diseases, why is MBC now trying to retract its retraction? The MBC labor union has fiercely criticized...
Categories Censorship/Media Criticism/The Fifth Column
August 11, 2008

The Freedom of the State’s Press to Deceive the People Shall Be Abridged

[Updated below] In the wake of a court’s decision ordering a retraction of a distorted, sloppy, and  false  MBC report that triggered massive anti-government protests, Lee Myung Bak is moving to clean house.   A principled approach would be to ask why Korea’s government (or for that matter, ours) is in the business of broadcasting the news anyway and just saw off this vestigial limb.  Instead, Lee is being Lee and conducting a purge. The shakeup culminated on Friday at national...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Censorship/Korean Society/Media Criticism/The Fifth Column
July 31, 2008

Court Orders MBC to Broadcast a Retraction on Mad Cow Report

A Seoul civil court on Thursday found an influential MBC report on U.S. beef health risks “wrong” and ordered the major broadcaster to air a correction, upholding the government’s complaint over the critical coverage.    “PD Notepad should broadcast a correction of its wrong piece on mad cow disease,” Judge Kim Sung-gon of the Seoul Southern District Court said in the verdict. The Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries raised a complaint against the popular MBC current affairs program,...
Categories Anti-Americanism/Censorship/Korean Society/Media Criticism
July 31, 2008

Famine Strikes N. Korean Region that Floods Missed

As busy as I’ve been at work, I’ve been derelict in covering the famine.  But the famine continues to spread and worsen, according to the Word Food Program: North Korea is suffering its worst food crisis since the late 1990s due to rising grain prices and a poor harvest, the U.N. food agency said Wednesday. “We believe that the food security situation right now, in many parts of the country, is the worst that it has been since the late...
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Media Criticism
July 8, 2008

History, Through Charles Hanley’s Soda Straw

[Update:   See also GI Korea’s post.  Neither Hanley nor Syngman Rhee comes out of this one looking good, nor do U.S. officials and officers who had the breathtakingly poor judgment to attend Lee’s killings.  Clearly, however, Hanley has told us nothing we didn’t already know.]   Professional atrocity monger Charles Hanley is back again, faithful to his  rigid 13-month  schedule, to report breaking news from 1948 that contains no relevations for Korea-watchers:  Syngman Rhee  turns out to have been...
Categories Korean War/Media Criticism