So far, the profession of journalism has reacted to the AP’s North Korean propaganda amplification project with more bemused professional courtesy than ethical introspection. Still, we’re seeing a small trickle of mildly curious reporting on this arrangement, whose details the AP continues to protect from the eyes of its readers. Here and there, however, that trickle carries us a few more facts the AP never told us, in this case, about one of the two “journalists” embedded in the AP’s...

In my lonely critique of the AP’s sketchy relationship with the North Korean government, throughout its recent absorption into North Korea’s official propaganda apparatus, I’ve often observed that its new Pyongyang correspondent, Jean H. Lee, isn’t very good at asking obvious questions. As it turns out, her editors aren’t very good at answering them, either. In a new article in Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish becomes the first actual journalist to question, however gently, this new relationship and its potential...

So once again, KCNA has turned its AP propaganda amplifier up to eleven, informing us of that, according to “rare interviews … with Pyongyang residents,” North Koreans don’t trust the Americans to keep the post-Groundhog Day Agreement. The correspondent quotes a grand total of five North Koreans, including one soldier, one lieutenant colonel, a Foreign Ministry official, and two women whose occupations are not listed. Typically for the AP’s recent reports from Pyongyang, it invites more questions than it answers,...