New Media Lead the Way in Covering North Korea
Interestingly, this tacit admission comes from the L.A. Times, no less.
[Defector Zhu Sung-Ha, now a journalist] criticized South Korean intelligence for not getting inside the Pyongyang government. “The two Koreas have been at war for 60 years,” Zhu said, in reference to the state of war that has officially existed since the Korean War. “During that time they should have placed someone close to Kim. I am surprised their intelligence is so weak.”
As a result, much of the limited snooping comes from unlikely sources, including amateurs who use Google Earth satellite mapping technology to track North Korean military hardware
“There are a host of people who have made it their hobby to look at interesting features of the North Korean landscape,” said Scott Snyder, a Korea analyst for the Asia Foundation. “They’re like the old short-wave radio guys. They have tried to label stuff like North Korean nuclear facilities and the locations of airfields, and they spend time debating on Internet chat rooms.”
Howard said he founded his Open Radio for North Korea broadcasts as a way to encourage the open trading of information between the Koreas.
He said the nadir of North Korea intelligence gathering came during the 1990s famine when outsiders were unable to determine how many residents were dying from starvation.
“The range [of estimates] was so wide — between 500,000 to 1 million people,” he said. “Something so critical, yet nobody knew for sure.” [….]
Good Friends publishes regular Internet reports on North Korea. One included such headlines as “Food Shortage Lowers the Attendance of a Munitions Factory in Eunduk County” and “15 People Publicly Executed in Onsung County.”
The group has also broken North Korean news, including an explosion in June involving a petroleum pipeline near Pyongyang.
“Someone threw a cigarette without thinking. There were lots of casualties, even deaths,” Kang said. “South Korean intelligence denied the story. They later came back and said we were right.” [L.A. Times, John M. Glionna]
Good friends has also been wrong, but so have the traditional media, with their cheerleading for Chris Hill’s desperate last-ditch diplomacy, and their conspicuous lack of skepticism that this would actually disarm North Korea, despite overwhelming evidence that it never would. Some of their reporting of Kim Jong Il’s reported stroke(s) has often relayed details so suspect that they bordered on parody (my favorite being the IHT report that His Porcine Majesty could brush his own teeth!), and much of it was mutally contradictory. They’ve seldom been a source of any reliable information at all about actual conditions inside North Korea, which is where such sources as Good Friends, Open Radio, and the Daily NK have excelled through the use of raw human intelligence.
Just as one could say that traditional sources of information — both open-source and otherwise — have lagged in reporting facts we think we know, one could also say that traditional diplomacy has lagged in its communications with North Korea itself, for same reason: both have been unwilling to sidestep the regime and reach directly to the people. (It’s fair to note, however, that the L.A. Times has done about the best job of the U.S. media in doing that.)
As a result, non-traditional methods of reaching through the information blockade are proving increasingly influential, even disruptive toward the deliberate inaction of appointed statesmen. It’s doubtful, however, that these new methods are sufficiently developed to effect the change that our institutions lack the will and the imagination to effect. At best, they are a necessary embarrassment for the institutions that are failing us.