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April 2, 2012

AP Exclusive = Re-Gifted Commercial Satellite Photography!

You’re kidding me. After all those ethical compromises, the AP can’t even get the North Korean minders journalists in its Pyongyang Bureau to bring it within a half-mile of the rocket and launch pad His Porcine Majesty starved so damn many kids to build? So the AP’s latest “exclusive” is a story by Foster Klug, who is based in Washington, writing about commercial satellite photographs shown to him by a local think tank, which probably purchased them commercially. Why, Digital...

Categories AP Watch
March 22, 2012

Irony Alert: North Korea Reveals the Truth about the Associated Press and Human Rights Watch (Updated)

I’d like to interrupt my advocacy of the violent overthrow of the North Korean government to thank the Korea Central News Agency, North Korea’s official “news” service, for being so much more transparent than the Associated Press has been about the new relationship between the two agencies. For the last few weeks, I’ve made a personal jihad of obtaining photographic proof that the joint photo exhibit by the AP and KCNA, which opened this week in New York, is not...

Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
March 19, 2012

The Associated Press Sends Birthday Greetings to Eternal Great Leader Kim Il Sung!

So far, the profession of journalism has reacted to the AP’s North Korean propaganda amplification project with more bemused professional courtesy than ethical introspection. Still, we’re seeing a small trickle of mildly curious reporting on this arrangement, whose details the AP continues to protect from the eyes of its readers. Here and there, however, that trickle carries us a few more facts the AP never told us, in this case, about one of the two “journalists” embedded in the AP’s...

Categories AP Watch
March 13, 2012

AP Editor compares N. Korea’s surveillance of journalists to U.S., Germany

In my lonely critique of the AP’s sketchy relationship with the North Korean government, throughout its recent absorption into North Korea’s official propaganda apparatus, I’ve often observed that its new Pyongyang correspondent, Jean H. Lee, isn’t very good at asking obvious questions. As it turns out, her editors aren’t very good at answering them, either. In a new article in Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish becomes the first actual journalist to question, however gently, this new relationship and its potential...

Categories AP Watch
March 10, 2012

Wanted: Photos & Video of AP’s Kim Il Sung Glorification Exhibit in New York (Updated with Location, Hours, Photos)

Yonhap is reporting that the Kim Il Sung commemorative photo exhibit to be co-sponsored by the Associated Press and the official North Korean “news” service, will open next Thursday: A group of North Korean journalists left for the United States Saturday to attend a photo exhibition set to open next week, marking the centenary of the birth of the North’s late founding leader, Kim Il-sung, the country’s media said. The North’s delegation, led by Kim Chang-gwang, vice director of the...

Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
March 6, 2012

WTF? AP and KCNA co-sponsor “Day of the Sun” Kim Il Sung propaganda exhibit in New York?

Ever since the Associated Press signed an MOU with North Korea’s official “news” agency establishing a bureau in Pyongyang, I’ve tracked a disturbing trend in the AP’s coverage, starting with its global distribution of a doctored photograph designed to finagle food aid out of potential donors. The other day, the latest in a series of reports echoing KCNA’s propaganda caused me to say that it had turned its AP propaganda amplifier up to eleven. In retrospect, I should have saved...

Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
March 4, 2012

AP’s coverage of North Korea strikingly similar to The Onion’s

So once again, KCNA has turned its AP propaganda amplifier up to eleven, informing us of that, according to “rare interviews … with Pyongyang residents,” North Koreans don’t trust the Americans to keep the post-Groundhog Day Agreement. The correspondent quotes a grand total of five North Koreans, including one soldier, one lieutenant colonel, a Foreign Ministry official, and two women whose occupations are not listed. Typically for the AP’s recent reports from Pyongyang, it invites more questions than it answers,...

Categories AP Watch
February 24, 2012

China abets the murder of nine North Korean refugees

South Korean legislators on Friday condemned China’s repatriation of fugitives from North Korea after Beijing reportedly sent nine back despite pleas from Seoul. A resolution passed by the committee on foreign affairs and unification urges China to follow international rules in handling North Koreans who flee their impoverished homeland, and seeks outside help to halt the returns. [AFP] Seoul says it might (gasp) raise this with the U.N. Human Rights Council — without mentioning China by name. But despite all...

Categories AP Watch/China/Human Rights/Refugees
January 20, 2012

Global news agency being held hostage in North Korea.

The dalliance between the Associated Press and the Korean Central News Agency, the world’s most mendacious news agency, has already fathered the global distribution of doctored photographs and some awfully dubious journalism by its correspondent, Jean H. Lee — and transmitted all of it to hundreds of millions of news consumers around the world. Recall that last summer, just after the AP first signed a joint distribution agreement with KCNA, the AP distributed this photograph of a flood in North...

Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
December 30, 2011

KCNA caught doctoring photos again

Yet again, KCNA, the world’s least reputable news agency, has been caught providing a foreign news agency with a doctored photo, and said foreign news agency went to print with it and had to kill it. The alteration is not dramatic; instead, it is so casual as to suggest that to KCNA, this sort of thing is no big deal.  Take a look at the small group of stragglers to the left of the orderly formations along the street.  As...

Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
July 26, 2011

Questions Unasked

Just days after the AP fell victim to a photo hoax by KCNA, the official North Korean “news” agency it partnered up with, the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau Chief, Jean H. Lee, seems not to have taken to heart that “journalist” does not mean in North Korea what it means in other places: But this year, David and I have been granted unprecedented access as part of AP’s efforts to expand its coverage of North Korea. We traveled into the countryside,...

Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism
July 20, 2011

At least the News of the World didn’t publish doctored North Korean photographs

It’s hard to take at face value the public ostracizing of Rupert Murdoch as a cancer within journalism even as the world’s two foremost wire services have just associated themselves with the world’s most fraudulent news organization. I refer to the AP’s announcement late last month that it had made a deal with Kim Jong Il’s own Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) to open a bureau in Pyongyang, and the more recent announcement by Reuters that it had “expanded” its...

Categories AP Watch/Media Criticism