Home  >  AP Watch / Media Criticism

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 launch, has given networks, newspapers and wires a rare opportunity to report from within the country. NBC’s Richard Engel, ABC’s Bob Woodruff and CNN’s Stan Grant are among those who have already produced curtain-raising segments on the days ahead. The Associated Press is turning out blow-by-blow coverage, and reporters are tweeting and filing frequently.
But Vietor fears that by flooding the zone in North Korea, U.S. media outlets are providing the country’s leadership with propaganda tools that will only embolden their efforts to enhance its intercontinental ballistic missile capability.

“North Korea is trying to sell this to the world as being about space exploration, when really it’s about testing missile technology,” he told me. “They’re using the press, using this angle of a space mission, to hide their real goal.

At the same time, he said, “they are tightly tacking the press into tight areas so they only see military hardware. They’re not allowing them to tour the countryside and see the people who are starving.     [Politico; HT]

I wonder if the Politico’s correspondent knows the half of it.

9 Responses

  1. It can also be perceived as a golden opportunity to humiliate the North Korean regime. If only a bold reporter would ask questions that are not on the short list of permitted topics; … like how many prison camp laborers are being used to dig the tunnels for the nuclear test…

  2. On April 10, KCNA ran another item on the media aftermath of the photo exhibition in New York: http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2012/201204/news10/20120410-57ee.html : “The exhibition is a clear proof of broad understanding and sympathy of the world progressives with dignified Kim Il Sung’s Korea, Songun Korea.”

    Clearly for Pyongyang this “news” is to be interpreted as part of the upswell leading to the current conference on Juche which is described by Haggard http://www.piie.com/blogs/nk/?p=5619 and whose budget appears to include all-expense paid trips for over 100 foreigners to Pyongyang, according to an ROK official’s statement to Chosun Ilbo http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/03/20/2012032000690.html

    Did anyone else notice that the North Korean pins have now gotten bigger? Double portraits of the dead Kims, even seemed to be photoshopped on to official portraits. Maybe this happened before and I simply missed it.

    As evidence, see Jang Song Taek’s April 2009 portrait http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/12/19/after-kim-jong-il-a-look-at-the-kim-family-tree/slide/chang-sung-taek/#chang-sung-taek

    and compare it with his “new” portrait (released today on Rodong Sinmun). http://www.rodong.rep.kp/InterKo/index.php?strPageID=SF01_02_01&newsID=2012-04-12-0028

    Not only is the new pin photoshopped on, Jang got a new suit! With so many accoutrements to go around, perhaps they are on their way to a prosperous nation after all.

  4. “Wrong turn grants glimpse behind N. Korean curtain.”

    This is a new AP story today, April 12, 2012. It is a classic indoctrination piece…the three buses went the wrong way, and reality struck. But AP avoids reality by saying New Delhi was worse, that “office politics” and “days at the beach” are human desires in North Korea. “They wage office politics, dream of buying cars and, if they have enough clout, they hope to get away to the beach in the summer.”

    Yeah, right. Tell that to the women scrounging the denuded hills for spring herbs to add to the mandatory April 15 baskets. It is a very frightening example of Soviet Doublespeak from the 1930s.

    This recovery piece even has wonderfully misused words….”If that means using propaganda that seems insensible to outsiders, few of whom believe the official version of Pyongyang as a communist idyll, it is very logical in Pyongyang.” Insensible? No, nonsensical or insensitive. Insensible means “numb” or catatonic. But the use of the wrong word, when the right word is deeply critical, is a common tactic for sympathetic journos.

    And of course, it has no photographs.

  6. I’m actually with Glans on this one. I thought it was not only reasonably balanced, but revealing of the lengths the regime will go to deceive the press. It’s actually pretty damning for the AP’s home team, since they seem to be taken in by exactly what’s described in this article. I’d planned to write more on this.

  7. The AP reporter wondered why North Korean minders bother to hide ordinary Pyongyang neighborhoods that are shabby but not desperately poor like ones in New Delhi or filthy and crime-ridden like parts of NYC. An explanation that is obvious to anyone familiar with North Korea is that no neighborhood in Seoul looks nearly as run-down and spartan as most of Pyongyang, hence the need to maintain a Potemkin Village.

  8. I don’t want to be too reactionary, but in my youth a very long time ago when the Cold War was really cold, there was a journalistic mechanism for whitewashing harsh reality and to turn it back into a paean of praise for the Sovs. It consisted of stating the truth marginally, finding human cues to show there was another preferred reality and to slam the decadent West in the same paragraph. This is just the same.

    Now, in the most heavily subsidized city in North Korea, where only apparatchiks with special passes are allowed, there is still genuine poverty to be found, and yet the AP goes into transports of delight about days at the beach. The AP journos aren’t objective, dispassionate or truthful: they are, from this piece, clearly fellow-travellers in a very long history of disinformation. It’s a bad memory from long ago.

    Still, those poor people in the back streets won’t be facing firing squads for sabotaging the historic missile (er, satellite) launch as will be the silent fate of some of those in the Pyongyang high rises.