Category: AP Watch

The AP’s Pyongyang Bureau Chief, Eric Talmadge, has managed to coax the AP’s business partners at KCNA into letting him and photographer David Guttenfelder travel from Pyongyang to Mt. Paektu in the far north, by car. Having been duly warned not to got lost—or “you will be shot”—Talmadge and his minder stocked up on fuel coupons, Evian, and Skippy, and headed off toward Wonsan. Even on the loneliest of lonely highways, we would never be without a “minder,” whose job was...

Jesus wept. The U.N. is debating North Korea’s crimes against humanity, state TV admits that Kim Jong Un is “not feeling well,” his Number Two, Chae Ryong Hae, was just removed from his post, and the Comcast of Journalism brings us this exclusive report from Derek Zoolander: While rubber boots and utilitarian flats remain the norm elsewhere in North Korea, high heels in a wide array of colors and styles are commonplace in Pyongyang. They range from basic black to glittery sequined styles...

[UPDATE: Welcome, Weekly Standard readers.] The Associated Press, which in 2012 co-sponsored “A Joint Exhibition by the Associated Press and the Korean Central News Agency Marking 100 Years Since the Birth of Kim Il Sung,” is furious at the White House for using official photographers (rather than independent photojournalists) to “propagate an idealized portrayal of events on Pennsylvania Avenue.” Writing in the pages of The New York Times, Santiago Lyon, Vice President and Director of Photography at The Associated Press, assails...

Frankly, I’m glad to see someone at the AP begin to address my criticisms on their substance, even if the hardest questions went unasked. The original article at Foreign Policy is here. Below is my response, as posted in the comments, with one typo corrected. I wish the author of this article had offered me an opportunity to comment or respond, because there’s much that the article left unsaid. In any event, I’d like to offer FP’s readers a better...

One of my favorite media experiments is to observe different reporters with different biases cover similar stories in very different ways. The anniversary of the end of the Korean War was our most recent occasion for this experiment, and Pyongyang was our petri dish. Not surprisingly for regular readers of this blog, reporters who were merely visiting Pyongyang covered it very differently from reporters beholden to its regime by business and professional entanglements. One perspective tells a story of former...

Wow … just, wow. 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.

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...