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Category: Media Criticism

February 11, 2007

Curb Your Enthusiasm

See if you can spot any patterns here.  Let’s begin on a very high note: McClatchy News, Feb. 7:   The U.S. envoy to international talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis said Thursday that he was optimistic negotiators were nearing a breakthrough. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Feb. 7,  Headline:   North Korea:  A Breakthrough at hand as talks resume today?  [OFK note:  at least they didn’t say “peace is at hand.”] NY Times, Feb. 7:   The long-stalled six-way talks on...

Categories Diplomacy/Media Criticism/Six-Party Talks/WMD
February 9, 2007

Negotiating With Terror

I normally don’t really give a rat’s ass what al-Qaeda says in its videotapes, but this does seem more than mildly newsworthy: And in yet another gambit that smacks of desperation, [al-Qaeda in Iraq leader  Abu Omar] al-Baghdadi tries to rile up the French and the Chinese against American global hegemony, and addresses those nations as “the freemen of the world.” Not only that, but he adopts a scolding tone with North Korea, essentially invoking the “sharing is caring” line,...

Categories Diplomacy/Media Criticism/Terrorism (NK)/WMD
February 7, 2007

OK, But in All Fairness, Chomsky Pyschosis Is a Diagnosis, Too

John Feffer could be more accurately described as a  hack  apologist for  its regime than an authority on North Korea.  Feffer recently won  himself a  Bruce Cumings  Prize  for the  year’s  most  spectacularly ill-timed defense of the indefensible.  What the Soviet archives did for Cumings’s academic reputation,  the Havel-Wiesel-Bondevik report  ought to have done for Feffer’s denial of Kim Jong Il’s culpability for the great famine  that sacrificed millions of lives for nukes and missiles,  had anyone actually read what...

Categories Media Criticism/Unintended Humor/WTF?
January 23, 2007

al-Yahoo Update

[Update:   Another misleading headline from AP, here.  I suppose if you’re going to lament the terrible quality of our intelligence, you have to be even more depressed about the quality of the information we often get from our news media.  It strikes me as hypocritical for those responsible for the latter fiasco to be caustic in their criticism of the former fiasco.  At least the  CIA  can say that it’s not easy to unveil the deceptions of  secretive tyrannies. ...

Categories Media Criticism/Terrorism/Iraq
January 21, 2007

Somewhere in Hell, Josef Goebbels Is Smiling: Klaus Bender’s Big Lie

Update: In my visitors’ log today: Original Post: You may recall that a few weeks back, I noted that the Korean press had picked up a story from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one that many of its readers will no doubt be eager to believe. The story reported that North Korean supernotes are actually made by the CIA at an undisclosed location near Washington, D.C. Not being much of a German linguist, I made myself a reminder to find an...

Categories Anti-Americanism/Counterfeiting/Europe/Media Criticism
January 21, 2007

al-Yahoo Watch: News Consumers Need Warning Labels, Too

[Updated, scroll down]   The headline:  25 U.S. troops killed in Iraq Saturday I have my home page set to Yahoo because I use Yahoo e-mail, and there are two things about  Yahoo’s home-page headlines  that I’ve noticed and meant to start picking at  for a long time.  One is the tendency for the headlines to  emphasize only negative developments in  Iraq, chiefly casualties.  This headline, for example, could  just as well have told us  that Mookie Sadr, under pressure...

Categories Media Criticism/Terrorism/Iraq
January 16, 2007

Dispulitzated

Holy Mother of Pearl — GI Korea’s dismantling of AP Reporter Charles Hanley (Part 2,  Part 1)  is one  for the ages.  Please remind me to learn from the pile of cinders that was once Charles Hanley and never mess with GI Korea.  On the other hand, Hanley’s own comment on GI Korea’s blog may be the most damning condemnation of his objectivity and professionalism.  I responded directly to Hanley there.

Categories Blogs & Blogging/Korean War/Media Criticism
December 13, 2006

Fun With Konglish

Although history may eventually record that the Daily NK was the most important Korean newspaper of this century, I sometimes wish I had the time to help them out with their English edition: The newspaper also reported that while N. Korea has screwed most of salaries of its workers recently dispatched in Czech and Poland, it has seemed to actively export their workers to the Middle-East areas. Somehow, I don’t think that came out quite as meant.  It’s an interesting...

Categories Media Criticism/Unintended Humor
December 5, 2006

The UniFiction of North Korean ‘Journalism’

South Korean journalists recently traveled to North Korea and met with what represents their profession up there.  And wouldn’t you know it?  They found a remarkable degree of common ground. “We, journalists of the South and the North, support the Joint Statement of June 15, 2000 and take the lead in implementing it; We firmly oppose and reject any outside intervention in the internal affairs of the nation and threats of war; We will reject any report that can foster...

Categories Media Criticism
November 21, 2006

OhMyLosingMoney

This despite free money from a friendly Blue House.  I echo GI Korea’s objections to this statement: OhmyNews execs say the biggest difference between blogs and their service is the role of professional journalists. Blogs don’t have the credibility of OhmyNews, where professionals screen, edit, and fact-check stories from ordinary folks to filter out inaccuracies and potentially libelous claims, the company argues. Whether that kind of quality control will differentiate OhmyNews from competing sources of news and commentary remains to...

Categories Blogs & Blogging/Media Criticism
October 27, 2006

What a Dumb Question

Sorry, but I don’t recall anyone except a collection of has-beens suggesting “military action” against North Korea.  But if you ask registered or likely voters what that means, I suppose the most reasonable interpretations are invasion and air strikes.  If so,  please count me firmly among  the 56%  opposed.  If it means interdicting their boatloads of Iran-bound uranium, as authorized by a U.N. resolution (which apparently means a lot to some people), then that’s how the question should have been...

Categories Media Criticism
October 19, 2006

Interview: L. Gordon Flake, Executive Director, Mansfield Foundation

Gordon Flake (bio)  is two things that make his opinions interesting and valuable to me.  First, he’s a fluent Korean speaker, and those of us who aren’t are always at some disadvantage to those who do when we are gathering the facts we process into our views.  Second — and Gordon may not agree with this characterization — his views  strike me as classically  liberal. His views are probably more independent and less jaundiced by partisan bias or  ambitions  than...

Categories An Alliance?/Anti-Americanism/Appeasement/Blogs & Blogging/Famine & Food Aid/Google Earth/Human Rights/Korean Politics/Korean Society/Media Criticism/NK Economics/Proliferation/Refugees/U.S. & Korea/Washington Views
August 17, 2006

TKL Saves Washington’s Upstanding Moral Reputation

The questionable massage parlor James blogged about here has been raided and shut down. In the District, federal agents targeted five brothels that were masquerading as massage parlors or spas. The establishments were 14K Spot, which operated in a basement in the 1400 block of K Street Northwest; Downtown Spa, in the 1000 block of Vermont Avenue Northwest; OK Spa, in the 2400 block of Wisconsin Avenue Northwest; Cleveland Park Holistic Health, on the second floor of a building in...

Categories Human Trafficking/Korean Society/Media Criticism/Uncategorized
August 9, 2006

Worst Reporting Ever

[Update: Even more Hezbollah media exploitation. And Matt has a photo where the North Koreans are caught in the act, too. Check out M.C. Escher up on the blue thing, welding away with his Inspector Gadget arms. On a completely unrelated note, but on the same blog, here’s a rather interesting theory, for all six of you who haven’t seen it yet. I must say the silence is probably the most compelling part of the case.] I’ve had plenty of...

Categories Media Criticism/Terrorism (NK)
July 29, 2006

A Bad Review for ‘A State of Mind’

[Update: Yonhap reports that this year’s Arirang Festival has been cancelled. Scroll down for details.] I haven’t seen the film, nor have I seen the promos for it, but this sounds like a fair criticism to me: You know you’re looking at propaganda when you see a cute little white dog prancing through the apartment of the physicist father of 11-year-old Kim Song-yon – as if dogs come with the nice kitchen and furniture for middle-class North Koreans. Or, judging...

Categories Media Criticism/Miscellaneous/North Korea
June 21, 2006

Translation Error?

Just what exactly is the Chosun Ilbo suggesting here when it says that “[t]he people will have to take matters into their own hands,” in the context of [local] elections not resulting in their preferred [national]policies? The fact that the piece otherwise has no real point raises my suspicions. I mean, isn’t that one of the big downers of fixed terms of office, you know, when the other party gets elected to them?

Categories Korean Politics/Media Criticism