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 this AP report puts it, “[W]hen a handful of dawdlers messed up those regimented lines, they were eliminated. From the photo, that is.”  KCNA was only caught because a Kyodo news photographer shot the procession from the same vantage point at the same instant.  Compare:

Recall that the Associated Press was taken in by an altered KCNA image several months ago, just after a splashy announcement that it was entering into an agreement with KCNA that allowed it to station a correspondent in Pyongyang and use KCNA content.  Some of the reporting from the AP’s Jean H. Lee that followed seemed to reflect either an unhealthy sympathy for the regime or a degree of ideological captivity engendered by the new relationship.  I haven’t seen anything so questionable under Lee’s byline since then.  That time, the apparent objective was to make North Korea’s floods seem worse than they really were to gain foreign sympathy and aid.  This time, the apparent objective is to portray a regimented image of North Korean society.  A good starting point for analysis is to suspect the opposite of whatever illusion this regime projects.  Casual observers of North Korea are usually taken in by the images of discipline, obedience, and adoration.  Those who watch North Korea more carefully — and this knowledge is what tends to set them apart from the former group — know that life outside of Pyongyang increasingly totters on the edge of anarchy.

Late word is that another photograph of the funeral, this one distributed by the AP (courtesy of KNCA) has come under suspicion for the unnatural size of a lone soldier standing behind a formation of soldiers.