Category: AP Watch

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,...

“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:...

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...

If anything comes of the Richardson-Schmidt visit to Pyongyang, Jean Lee will be the first foreign journalist to break the story of the visit.  Huzzah for her, then, because Ms. Lee desperately needs to show that AP can report anything from Pyongyang that is (a) true, (b) newsworthy, and (c) exclusive to justify the existence of her new bureau.  Still, I’d nominate Lee’s exclusive coverage of the opening of Kim Jong Il’s mausoleum as her magnum opus, apparently filed from some...

According to an exclusive, groundbreaking AP report from the frontier of journalism — Pyongyang — 100% of North Korean citizens interviewed by other North Koreans in a bar support Great Leader Kim Jong Un’s completely successful launch of a peaceful satellite despite the hostile policy of the imperialist Barack Obama! In Pyongyang, however, pride over the scientific advancement outweighed the fear of greater international isolation and punishment. North Korea, though struggling to feed its people, is now one of the...

Finally. An AP reporter goes to North Korea and puts the showpieces of Pyongyang into the context of how people in the rest of North Korea live. Naturally, the reporter is Tim Sullivan. There are no nightspots here, no modern apartment complexes, no electricity except for a few hours every evening. The shelves in most stores are noticeably half-empty, and dirt sidestreets lead to clusters of small houses, many little more than shacks, with bulging walls and broken roofs. It...

MY MY, LOOK WHAT slipped out of the memory hole. Double plus odd. ——————————————– SO THIS POST SEEMS TO HAVE TRIGGERED a Twitter skirmish between reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post on one side, and the AP on the other. It all starts when the NYT’s Hiroko Tabuchi, retweeting my post, says, “Time-old trap: offer of access -> controlled info,” and then tweets that another Jean H. Lee story “does read a bit like KNCA .....

Let’s take stock of what the AP has accomplished in the year-plus since it announced those agreements with North Korea — the ones it still hasn’t disclosed — to open a bureau in Pyongyang.  It disseminated at least one faked photo globally; co-sponsored a Kim Il Sung propaganda exhibition in Manhattan with North Korea’s official “news” service; invited two North Korean propagandists into its news team; and provided us a stream of leash-and-collar journalism that repackages North Korean propaganda with...

I’ve been waiting for The Columbia Journalism Review to inquire into the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau, so imagine my disappointment to see them interview Korea (and Pyongyang) Bureau Chief Jean H. Lee and squander that opportunity by lobbing softballs.  I mean, seriously, not one question about this?  Not one probing question about the AP’s MOUs with the North Korean government? (Psst.  They have a comments section.) The AP-KCNA experiment continues to be failure nonetheless.  Seven months later, the AP sits in...