Is KCNA Replaying the Kumgang Gambit?

Recently, the AP’s Pyongyang Bureau has produced thankfully little of the reprocessed KCNA propaganda that caused me to set up my AP Watch category. It’s still not too much to hope that the AP will cease to deceive its readers by reporting stage-managed propaganda as news, or as an accurate portrayal of life in North Korea. The next weeks will tell us whether this trend will persist, and whether the AP’s corporate management has any shame.  They have invested a great deal of intangible capital in this arrangement; they will not want a public blow-up of the relationship.

When South Korea suspended its participation in the Kumgang tourism project after a North Korean soldier shot and killed housewife Park Wang-Ja for strolling into a restricted zone, the North’s response was to make a public show of the flirtations of other suitors to invest in Kumgang. Nothing came of this, of course. It was a transparent pressure tactic; no one could have really believed that there was a great untapped demand to visit Kumgang by anyone but South Koreans. (After all, how many of us will see Ha Long Bay, Santorini, Old Town Prague, and the ceiling of the Blue Mosque before we die?)

Similarly, you wouldn’t think there would be much pent-up demand for North Korean propaganda, but the North is showing off a new Indonesian suitor for its journalistic business model:

Under the agreement, Indonesia and North Korea will exchange television shows, photos and news, Priatna said. In the near future, the two nations will also swap journalists.

North Korea was ranked as the second most censored country in the world by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in 2012. According to CPJ reports, news in North Korea is controlled by the government’s Korean Central News Agency and is saturated with anti-United States propaganda and glowing reports of life in one of the most isolated nations on earth.  [Jakarta Globe]

It says plenty that North Korea’s totalitarianism still attracts revulsion from journalists in authoritarian Indonesia. The arrangement may be a money-maker for the Indonesian news service — there’s a lucrative market for reselling North Korean “news,” according to an insider I’ve corresponded with — but an Indonesian edit of KCNA propaganda hardly has the pernicious potential that an AP edit would.