North Korea ranks 197th out of 197 countries for press freedom this year,
Remember 2011, when Pyongyang’s deal with the Associated Press was supposed to usher in a new era of press freedom in North Korea? Wouldn’t it be great if one of the AP’s editors or correspondents would sit for an interview, review how that’s worked out, and answer hard questions about the North Korean regime’s restrictions on the access and coverage? I don’t mean softball interviews like this; I mean the kind of hard questions that make them execute evasive maneuvers, or walk away in a huff.
Come to think of it, we may need a whole new system to rank the press freedom of news agencies. I wonder how engagement with North Korea has affected the AP’s ranking.
For comparison: Eritrea is usually at the bottom of the press freedom rankings. All media in Eritrea has been regime-controlled since a coup in 2001. We can thus conclude that the AP’s presence in Pyongyang actually made North Korea’s press freedom worse than a country that doesn’t allow press at all.
They should have been 198th.
Here’s a hard-hitting report from AP’s Pyongyang bureau. Women wear stylish clothes.
Yeah, I’m going to have something to say about that.