It’s gratifying when a journalist has the principle and the cojones to publish what others don’t dare to say in public. Mr. Kirk, this post is good for one beer, redeemable on demand.
Archive for AP Watch
What would you ask the AP?
The AP is hosting an event on social media in North Korea, with the AP’s Eric Carvin and its Korea Bureau Chief, Jean H. Lee. Thanks to the readers who let me know.
The conversation was dead — no one seemed all that interested the AP’s views on social media amid the re-declaration of Korean War II — so I decided to stimulate a livelier discussion by asking whether the AP will ever reveal its agreements with KCNA, whether it pays North Korea anything under them, and whether AP should be more forthcoming with its readers about those arrangements, given the potential for conflicts of interest.
Oddly enough, rather than start a lively discussion, my questions seem to have thrown a wet blanket over things. (It’s the sort of uncomfortable silence you associate with the first Thanksgiving after the sex offender comes home from prison, right after Uncle Bob asks Ray and Nancy why they didn’t bring the kids.)
Hey, maybe your questions will liven things up a little. And then again, maybe the AP’s silence will speak volumes about its fearlessness and independence, or even reveal that North Korea has found a way to censor America’s most influential media organization, wherever it speaks.
Say, do you think Kim Jong Un might just be a complete doofus who happens to have nuclear weapons?
SO THE FIRST WELL-KNOWN AMERICAN to meet with Kim Jong Un is not an AP interviewer, a tribute-bearing Bill Richardson, a ransom-bearing Jimmy Carter, or first choice Michael Jordan. It is this man:
Strain, if you must, to make this into some sort of soft power diplomatic coup; it really looks like a tragic sequel to “Being There.” The very weirdness of it all is evident in some priceless exchanges from yesterday’s State Department daily press briefing.
Delectably, the AP’s part-time Pyongyang correspondent and photographer were scooped by Vice Media, led by Shane Smith, a man who is to journalism what The Dude is to alternative dispute resolution. Nate Thayer tells the story here. At least Smith, unlike the AP, does not ask us to take his brand of journalism seriously. What makes all of this even harder to explain is that Smith’s ventures into North Korea and North Korean logging camps in Siberia have portrayed North Korea as bizarre, controlling, brutish, and ridiculous. Smith, in other words, scooped the AP without (so far) having pulled any punches or sacrificed his objectivity. That’s why I’m willing to see the product Vice produces before I’m as critical as others have been, although I applaud another unlikely source, Gawker, for putting this circus into its rightful context.
You can’t help pity the AP which, for all its literary and literal prostrations – for all its willingness to make jarring ethical compromises to gain the regime’s favor – was frustrated in its priapistic lust for an interview with His Porcine Majesty. It looks like we’ll all have to wait a little longer to learn whether it’s briefs or boxers. Meanwhile, Jean Lee, the AP’s Korea Bureau Chief, must quote pesky upstart Vice to even report what Kim said to Rodman, and was otherwise relegated to tweeting pictures of sandwiches. No word yet on that AP expose on the starvation and cannibalism said to be ongoing a few miles to the south of Pyongyang. Maybe Vice will beat them to that, too.
I’ve been pondering why the North Koreans would snub such willing instruments as Jean Lee and Bill Richardson, people who could actually deliver things a wily regime could use to advance its coldly calculated interests. Instead, it left them all at the altar for a man who does, admittedly, look rather fetching in a wedding dress. The resulting publicity mostly portrays Kim Jong Un as a bizarre, detached hedonist in a kingdom of helots, a gluttonous man-child who is blithely apathetic about statecraft or the welfare of his pitiful subjects. Out west, where I’m from, our fathers teach us to take better care of our tools than this.
After consulting William of Occam, I offer this novel hypothesis: Could it be that Kim Jong Un is just an impulsive imbecile who happens to be the nominal leader of a state with nuclear weapons? Nothing we know about his academic history or his policy record contradicts my hypothesis.
Update: What. The. Fuck. (Hat tip).
AP Exclusive! North Korea’s nuke test a cry for peace
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — AP Pyongyang has all the logic and perspective of KCNA Pyongyang and none of the guilty pleasures of KCNA’s prose.
The way North Korea sees it, only bigger weapons and more threatening provocations will force Washington to come to the table to discuss what Pyongyang says it really wants: peace. [....]
North Korea has long cited the U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, and what it considers a nuclear umbrella in the region, as the main reason behind its need for nuclear weapons. North Korea and the U.S. fought on opposite sides of the bitter, three-year Korean War. That conflict ended in a truce in 1953, and left the peninsula divided by heavily fortified buffer zone manned by the U.S.-led U.N. Command.
Sixty years after the armistice, North Korea has pushed for a peace treaty with the U.S. But when talks fail, as they have for nearly two decades, the North Koreans turn to speaking with their weapons. [Jean H. Lee, AP]
I realize that Lee frequents a place where war is peace, but peace isn’t the first goal one would attribute to a regime that, less than four years ago, renounced the Korean War cease fire agreement, subsequently carried out two sneak attacks against South Korea, killing 50 of its citizens, and attempted to assassinate several defector-dissidents on South Korean soil.
Is this The Onion, you ask? No, this is The Onion.
The idea that a peace treaty with North Korea is the solution to our problems with North Korea is nonetheless the stated position of a small pro-North Korean fringe, and just about no one else, no doubt because the negotiations would give that fringe the chance to support North Korea’s preconditions for said peace. Still, I suppose it’s good to have clarity on where Lee stands.
For something a little better grounded in reality, see this Reuters analysis by Paul Eckert and Michael Martina:
A North Korean nuclear test draws international condemnation, modest U.N. sanctions and expressions of hope in the United States that China will finally rein in its brazen ally.
Beijing chides North Korea, but nothing much happens.
The world has seen this movie before and it’s likely to witness another rerun after North Korea’s third nuclear test on Tuesday.
See also this piece by Jeffrey Lewis and this one by Bruce Klingner, citing evidence that North Korea may already have a miniaturized and functional nuclear weapon that it can deliver on a missile. Say what you want about the accuracy of North Korea’s long-range missiles; its short and medium range missiles are thought to be accurate and effective enough to pose a real danger to South Korea and Japan.
If that’s not bad enough, consider how many terrorist-sponsoring clients North Korea has in the Middle East for its nuclear and missile technology. Claudia Rosett has an excellent summary in Forbes.
Open Sources, Feb. 13, 2013: Special Non-Nuclear Edition
I’D BEEN SAVING UP some anju links for later this week, but in light of the latest nuke test, I’m going to just clear the decks now. First, in response to J’s request, I set up an e-mail subscription feature. Tell me how that’s working for you.
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AP WATCH, PT. 1. The AP’s Vice President admits, in effect, that the only thing AP has gotten access to is the regime’s propaganda: Read more
Teenage girl’s blog post more interesting, informative, and balanced than AP Bureau Chief’s report.
Nate Thayer does it again. Don’t miss this one:
Why then did an amateur teenage college student accompanying her father on the same Google trip deliver a knockout blow in her blog posting of the high profile top world story, putting to shame with substance, detail, quotations from key participants, color, and written presentation the entire AP Korea coverage, despite the AP Pyongyang Bureau Chief, Ms Jean H. Lee being physically present at every event of the 4 day visit, even accompanying the official delegation on the airplane from Beijing?
Ouch. It’s both remarkable and embarrassing to read so many interesting facts in Sophie Schmidt’s post that Lee omits. What else isn’t AP Pyongyang telling us?
As much as North Korea may think that the Schmidt-Richardson trip may have been a domestic propaganda coup, it appears to have been a net loss for North Korea’s quest to burnish its global opinion.
Update: Now that I have confirmation that Sophie is only 19, I couldn’t help changing the title of this post.
AP VP denies N. Korean censorship, says he’s being treated well, confesses to “brigandish madcap war crimes.”
“KIM JONG” BILL RICHARDSON’S FIXER, TONY NAMKUNG, is one of those people who is so thoroughly despised by some North Korea watchers that they hesitate to express their views without consulting their lawyers. I know I should explain, but I haven’t consulted my lawyer. Instead, I’ll again refer you to this piece by Nir Rosen that paints Namkung in an unflattering light (without even seeming to try to do so). This week, Don Kirk convinces me that I don’t care much for Tony Namkung, either:
One of Namkung’s more impressive roles was that of adviser and intermediary for the Associated Press in opening a bureau in Pyongyang. Not surprisingly, one topic you don’t hear him talking about, or see mentioned in the AP’s upbeat coverage from there, is human rights.
Also not surprisingly, the AP had the inside track on Schmidt’s visit. At every photo-op, he and Richardson were seen smiling benignly. They were not about to offend their hosts with quotes about the inherent conflict between the quest for openness and transparency and North Korea’s policy of total suppression.
Well said, sir.
A year into the AP Pyongyang experiment, the AP seems uncharacteristically ambivalent about inviting media reflection on its record, although AP can’t avoid it entirely. Part of the reason may be that AP turns out to be pretty awful at media relations. For example, I don’t think AP Vice President John Daniszewski did much to help his case when, after leaving his anniversary meeting in Pyongyang with Tony Namkung, he told the VOA that AP’s reporting from Pyongyang isn’t subject to North Korean censorship. This wouldn’t be news at all if it wasn’t such a shock to our common sense:
A vice president of the Associated Press said news stories dispatched from the media outlet’s Pyongyang bureau are not censored by North Korean authorities although its reporters sometimes face difficulties securing access to news sources, a report by the Voice of America (VOA) said.
John Daniszewski said in an interview with VOA conducted on Jan. 10 that the AP news bureau in Pyongyang strictly follows the rules used to produce stories elsewhere and articles are not subject to state censorship in the North.
Daniszewski also announced that the AP stylebook would henceforth dictate the use of 14-point type for Kim Jong Un’s name and the small “s” for “south Korea.”
Now, far be it for me of all people to defend the AP here, but Daniszewski might be partially right about one thing — I mean, why should North Korea see any need to censor work that KNCA could just as well have written itself, and in some cases, actually may have? What KCNA didn’t write, it certainly stage-managed. What I’d really like to know is whether AP editors ever censor any of the KCNA-guided spectacles, show trials, hymns, and eulogies the AP is passing off to hundreds of millions of readers as journalism.
The executive said AP reporters in Pyongyang have difficulties accessing certain locations or events, but they are trying to resolve problems through discussions with authorities, adding stories sent from the bureau get verified through the same standards the news agency uses across the world.
What, you mean, just like the AP verified Park Jong Suk’s televised confession, while flanked by her terrified family members, that she was hoodwinked by south Korean spies to betray and abandon the fatherland and its wise and compassionate leader?
Daniszewski also said that he sensed some changes in the regime after North Korean media started showing Kim Jong-un accompanied by his wife attending public events. Such scenes were almost unheard of for the previous North Korean leader. Kim took over running the country in December 2011, after the sudden death of his father Kim Jong-il.
Yes, The people of North Korea have noticed some changes, too. So has at least one of your reporters, who’s covering the story from beyond the minders’ reach. Unfortunately, those changes aren’t the positive kind. (The U.N., for its part, says that despite “some initial hopes” for “some positive change in the human rights situation” after the coronation of His Porcine Majesty, there is “almost no sign of improvement.”) Most of the evidence actually shows that North Korea has become — if that’s possible — an even more closed society since then.
Why would any self-respecting journalist tell us things he should know are false? He could be merely ill-informed, biased, or (like his Pyongyang bureau chief) taken in by the regime’s illusions. To me, he mostly sounds very worried about how his words will be received in Pyongyang. This duress is several degrees removed from Park Jong Suk’s, but Daniszewski still comes off like he’s making a hostage video. For a man who’s trying to convince us that AP’s coverage isn’t censored, he sounds awfully censored himself.
He, however, noted that the world will probably have to wait and see before determining what course the present leader will take regarding the country’s foreign relations.
Really? So two missile tests later, you’re still seeing a blank slate, then?
The AP plans to dispatch reporters from its headquarters to the Pyongyang bureau within this year and expand coverage to the science and medical science sectors in the communist country, he said. The firm also wants to secure an opportunity to interview the North Korean leader, he added.
And so the motives are laid bare — no price is too high to pay for access! I look forward to the AP’s fearless and penetrating questions of His Porcine Majesty about the fate of Camp 22‘s prisoners, refugee and information crackdowns, the chronically misspent wealth and frustration of food aid monitoring, and those agricultural reforms we heard so much about last fall. For its part, the AP’s North Korean partner agency, its feet planted firmly on the trap door over Hell, insists that there are no prison camps, no starving kkotjaebi, and no political prisoners. Do you suppose Kim Jong Un’s handlers would allow him to be asked about these things, in the same way that Bashar Asad was, to his everlasting global humiliation? Wouldn’t it be tempting for the AP to simply agree not to bring these uncomfortable topics up?
Meanwhile, we look forward to Jean Lee’s exclusive coverage of the next Kimjongilia Festival. Hail ants!
In the year since its executives flew to Pyongyang, bowed before a towering idol of Kim Il Sung, and cut the ribbon on their new bureau, AP has been to North Korea what The Atlantic has been for Scientology, only more. If even AP is celebrating that anniversary so quietly, it can’t be particularly proud of the returns on its compromises.
Daniszewski in Pyongyang for AP Bureau’s Anniversary
Today’s installment comes to us from KNCA, no less: “John Daniszewski, vice president of the Associated Press of the United States, and his party arrived here by air on Monday.” Yes, that’s the entire story. Yonhap also picks up the story, but has little to add.
I suppose Daniszewski could have flown all the way to Pyongyang to ask KCNA to take his picture off its website, but I have to suspect that he’s there for more substantive discussions about AP’s work in North Korea. Speaking of the AP’s work in Pyongyang, it’s governed by two memoranda of agreement between AP and the North Korean government. Notwithstanding its own ethical standards about transparency and conflicts of interest, the AP has never disclosed those memoranda to its readers. Discuss among yourselves.
If this isn’t curious enough, KCNA fails to mention that this is the one-year anniversary of the opening of the AP Pyongyang bureau in anniversary-obsessed North Korea. Jean Lee’s Twitter feed and the AP Pyongyang “North Korea Journal” page are also silent — so far — about both Daniszewski’s visit and the anniversary. The relative absence of fanfare is noteworthy for two media organizations that had commandeered column space all over the world to give so much splashy attention to the opening of the bureau last year.
Open Sources, Jan. 12, 2013
AP WATCH: Judging by his bio and his Wikipedia page, Nate Thayer is one of the most cantankerous and accomplished freelance journalists of our time. I was going to write about some of the things Jean Lee didn’t say in her report about Eric Schmidt’s visit to Pyongyang, but Thayer beat me to it and saved me the trouble. Contrast Lee’s work to this, from David Chance and Park Ju-Min of Reuters. Has opening a bureau in Pyongyang made the AP’s journalism better or worse? Lee reported the fact of the Schmidt-Richardson trip first, but how many hours would it have taken for another journalist based in Seoul or Washington or Santa Fe to tell us that? What real significance can we attribute to this visit anyway? What good is the privilege of telling “exclusive” half-truths and lies if your independence is the price you must pay for it? Here’s a quote from an earlier post by Thayer:
The Associated Press Korea coverage is nothing short of a stain on, and an embarrassment to, the principles of a free press, and it is past time they cut it out, close their bureau in Pyongyang and apologize.
Hear, hear. I saw that Thayer commented here one morning and linked to this post. I was too busy to follow it at the time, but I’m glad I did today. Hat tip to an anonymous journalist (aside from Thayer himself).
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REALLY? ANDREW SULLIVAN LINKED ME and not one of us even noticed?
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ONE COUNTRY AT A TIME: Bienvenidos lectores españoles, y gracias a Eric Schmidt. One-on-one, I can hold my own fairly well in Spanish, but I admit to cheating and using Google Translate to read this El Mundo editorial. Considering how badly Google Translate works for Korean (though it’s improving) I’m surprised by how well it works with European languages.
What I notice about articles in the European press about North Korea is that their readers seem to be learning for the first time things that most American news readers probably knew about North Korea five years ago. I suspect this is because the burden of translating information into so many languages restricts information flows. Once again, Google unwittingly spreads the word about North Korea’s atrocities by steadily breaking down those barriers.
European reactions also seem different to me — less desensitized, more outraged, and more polarized, with a strong contingent of assorted leftists who reflexively defend the regime, deny the evidence of its abuses, and impute imperial motives to its critics. Do you suppose it would change anything if they knew that that the author of this blog was such a strong advocate of a reduced U.S. military presence in Korea?
No, I didn’t think so, either.
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VOA INTERVIEW: For those who are interested, the Voice of America prints an excerpt of an interview it did with me about technology, cell phones, and the political implications of information flow in North Korea.
While I think most attempts to analogize North Korea to other places are flawed, there are moments when I find relevance in my own experiences. I remember life before the Internet in South Dakota, when world news was virtually unobtainable, and I would get it by short wave radio from the VOA and BBC Africa services (at night, I could pick up such “exotics” as Havana, East Berlin, Moscow, and apartheid-era Johannesburg). Before the invention of blogs, I started keeping a journal of the reports of rioting and demonstrations in the then-Soviet Republics, sensing then that this trend would grow, and that it would eventually mean the Untergang of the Soviet Union. For some odd reason, the Africa services came in well during the daytime. If you’re old enough to remember life before the internet, can you also remember how it changed your own way of seeing the world?
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I’M ON RECORD AS OPINING THAT North Korea will not evolve toward reform or openness unless reform-minded officers or officials can pull off a coup, but I think evolution of this kind is possible in China. (A better question is whether Xi Jinping is the sort who’d permit it). China has just enough of a dissident culture and access to information that pressure will continue to build from within. This week’s events suggest that the pressure is still building, and that regime won’t be able to contain it forever.
Will one-party rule in North Korea outlast one-party rule in China, in the same manner that it outlasted the U.S.S.R.?
Open Sources, January 7, 2013
AP EXECUTIVES ON KCNA’S NEW FRONT PAGE! Like OFK, KCNA has made some changes to its web page. (In my own case, a hack attack led me to upgrade and update, which fixed the mysterious problem with the menu that had frustrated me for months — thanks, pro-North Korean hackers!) In KCNA’s case, their header now features (directly above His Porcine Majesty) Tom Curley, the AP’s now-retired CEO, and John Danizewski, its Vice President and Senior Managing Editor:
If George Orwell had produced a season of Hollywood Squares, I’m pretty sure it would have looked something like this layout. In the Charles Nelson Reilly position, immediately above and to the right of Curley and Daniszewski, is a picture of some unfortunate New York hipster, now immortalized in contemplative observation of the fruits of the AP-KCNA Exhibition in New York.
Anyway, there’s a lot to be thankful for this new year, aside from getting my menu fixed. First, we’ve kinda resolved that whole debate over whether the 8th Floor Exhibition was propaganda, and second, we’ll have new reasons to smile every time the AP’s top executives appear above KCNA’s announcements of Kim Jong Un’s supernatural feats, its calls to disembowel Park Geun-Hye or turn Seoul into a Sea of Fire, or the occasional sighting of a mythical beast.
HT: Adam Cathcart.
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FOR ONCE, JEAN H. LEE MUST BE APPALLED: North Korea bans nail polish. Funny, I thought North Korea was a land of Snoopy, Mickey Mouse, strapless gowns, and little black dresses!
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PREDICTION: CHINA WILL INVADE NORTH KOREA: Here’s my prediction: North Koreans would resist, and some South Koreans would help arm them, if only clandestinely. If a North Korean intervention becomes China’s Vietnam (or, more accurately, its second Vietnam) then it would be another unifying focus for internal dissent and protest in China and the Outer Koguryo Autonomous Zone. Word of Chinese casualties couldn’t spread in 1979, but it could today.
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MUST-READ: Daniel Pinkston argues that neither sticks nor carrots will cause North Korea to stop its WMD testing and development. I mostly agree. I’ve long since abandoned the belief that sanctions would change the regime’s basic pathology, but sanctions do serve a purpose if they’re properly designed, targeted, and enforced. They slow North Korea’s proliferation, weaken the regime overall, and depress its capacity to oppress its people so that the internal balance of power becomes slightly less unequal. If the regime consequently shows signs of significant internal instability, both North Korea and China might get serious about negotiated disarmament, but not before then.
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MUST-READ: Bruce Bechtol discusses scenarios for North Korea’s collapse.
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AJUMMA POWER: North Korean men can’t provide for their families, so women step into the void.
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DID NORTH KOREA SINK THE CHEONAN BECAUSE South Korea refused to pay up?
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THERE IS NOTICEABLY LESS ACADEMIC INTEREST in this not-at-all conciliatory message from North Korea:
Traitor Lee and his group, letting loose a spate of such malignant outbursts that the south should defend “the northern limit line” and “the north may perpetrate provocations based on the mode of striking the west while making noise in the east”, are getting frantic in the war maneuvers against the north while calling for “punishment” of someone. They hurled human scum into the operation of scattering leaflets.
The madcap confrontation racket kicked off by the group is an outright challenge to the aspiration of all the fellow countrymen for peace and reunification….
There is a limit to the DPRK’s patience and the spirit of its service personnel and people for annihilating the enemies is sky-high. Those who pursue confrontation with fellow countrymen and war are bound to ruin. [KCNA]
Tea leaf-readers take note — KCNA began equating Park Geun-Hye with Lee long before she was elected. It’s just a matter of time before she becomes the new Goldstein.
President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, and President Obama has seen no reason to revisit that decision. Discuss among yourselves.
