Open Sources, September 27, 2012: AP Watch Special Edition

MY MY, LOOK WHAT slipped out of the memory hole. Double plus odd.

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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 .. wow,” and we are off to the tractor pull. I wish I could tell you half of what I know about how troubled other journalists are about the AP’s Pyongyang experiment. Certainly some tough questions are overdue; unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t lend itself to what the AP’s readers deserve — a real debate about how the AP’s compromises with North Korean state control and messaging comport with standards of journalistic ethics. There isn’t a single, comprehensive code of ethics for journalists, but those compromises fare poorly when measured against the standards of the Associated Press Media Editors.
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IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE ANYWHERE NEAR EMORY UNIVERSITY ON OCTOBER 1, you’ll have your chance to ask AP suit Kathleen Carroll about AP’s Pyongyang Bureau. Think of some good ones, and if you can’t, tell me how she answers any of these. If I had more time on my hands, I’d build a complete reproduction of this outside the auditorium where the event is held, complete with long quotes from KCNA and the Rodong Sinmun about how brilliantly it glorified “dignified Kim Il Sung’s Korea, Songun Korea.”
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NK NEWS SCOOPS THE AP with the first pictures from inside the Ryugyong Hotel, via North Korea’s more established enablers at Koryo Tours. That’s gotta hurt.
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I SUSPECT THIS IS A BIGGER STORY THAN THE COVERAGE IT’S GETTING: North Korea sells off gold reserves to China. The last time North Korea did something that, in 2006, it was under extreme financial duress.
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CHINESE INVESTORS don’t seem very excited about putting their money into North Korea.
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MELANIE KIRKPATRICK SAYS U.S. policy should be to seek “the downfall of the Kim family regime” and one free Korea. Thanks to Ms. Kirkpatrick, by the way, for a review copy of her new book. I plan to read and review it piecemeal during my commutes on The Crazy Train, otherwise known as the Washington, D.C. Metro.