ABC News just recently did a report from Pyongyang and of course the Marmot is all over this one. It is pretty obvious ABC News is just pandering to the North Korean leadership to gain further access just in case tensions boil up between North Korea and the US they will be the first on scene in Pyongyang. They may be first from Pyongyang, but are they willing to report the truth?

Judging from how the media reported from Iraq when under control of Saddam Hussein, I wouldn’t bet on it. In the book Embedded the author describes how the media intentionally did not report anything negative to keep access:

– the bribes and gifts from journalists to Saddam’s henchmen, with reporters turning over copies of their stories to show how friendly they were to the regime. “A rigorous system for controlling and monitoring Western journalists has been in place in Iraq for decades, based on a wafer-thin facade of civility,” he wrote in the Times last April 20.

In his “Embedded” article, Burns is more caustic about the payoffs by journalists. He says big shots at the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from TV reporters, “who then behaved as if they were in Belgium.” Will these unnamed TV reporters be called to account?

Makes me wonder how much money ABC is passing to North Korea for this access.

The most ironic thing about this is that ABC News is so concerned about the alledged Guatanamo Bay prison abuse which the vast majority of the claims are made by terrorists trained to do just that, invent abuse claims to draw press coverage, but while they are in a country that is a living gulag they don’t seem to concerned about prison abuse there. However, they are concerned about their being no American products in the markets. I wonder if it has occurred to them that there are no products in the markets. I have been reading the book Rogue Regime and the author who used to work in Pyongyang talks about how he noticed when walking by grocery stores that the food for sale in the store was in fact plastic. Everywhere he went in Pyongyang was just a big staged show. Will ABC News report anything like that? I wouldn’t hold my breath to long on that.

Kim Jong Il is a lot smarter man than most people give him credit for. He is probably making a quick buck off of this plus getting good propaganda on top of it. I wonder how many other news media outlets will now compete for access to North Korea? Kim Jong Il can make an industry out of this.

UPDATE:
Make sure to read the Korea Sojourners take on this issue. It’s a good read.