Finding reliable news and information on North Korea is notoriously difficult. Even when outsiders are able to access the country, there are significant constraints and obstacles to open reporting. This became pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic when all non-North Koreans were expelled from the country. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the views of prominent foreign correspondents and journalists reporting and specialising on North Korea on Associated Press’s engagement in the country. On the basis of twenty longform semi-structured interviews with journalists from mastheads including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC and NK News, this paper finds that almost all those interviewed who worked from a Pyongyang-based news organisation said that beyond long-term strategic goals of simply maintaining a presence in North Korea, there was next to no benefit to news coverage in having a full-time news bureau in Pyongyang. Furthermore, the decision of Associated Press to operate a bureau in Pyongyang raised serious questions about how much editorial independence they were willing to sacrifice in order to placate the North Korean authorities.
Key words: North Korea, news, foreign correspondents, Associated Press
Introduction: Reporting North Korea
In 2011, as North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, suffered stroke after stroke and passed in and out of consciousness, time looked to be up for North Korea’s ruling family. For months the Dear Leader’s health had been a source of international speculation. In true North Korean style, the exact details of Kim Jong-il’s condition were a tightly held secret, and the Western Anglophone news was alive with the optimism of imminent regime change in the DPRK. On 19 December 2011, iconic North Korea newsreader Ri Chun Hee announced to the world in a quivering voice that Kim Jong-il had died of a massive heart attack two days before. In 2012, American news giant, the Associated Press (AP), opened a bureau in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, amid expectations of regime change that never came.
This essay investigates the controversy surrounding Associated Press operating out of the world’s most isolated capital city, Pyongyang. This essay has its basis in a much larger study investigating the constraints in reporting on North Korea and what this means for the overall framing and representation of North Korea. Along the way, many of the leading journalists reporting on the country for Western news media organisations were interviewed. The interviewees represented news organisations including The New York Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, NK News, the Guardian and the BBC. Lack of access to North Korea and North Koreans came to characterise their responses, although since 2014 more and more foreign journalists have been allowed in the country to cover official state events in a highly managed and curated setting. This access came to a sudden end in 2020 with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Alongside the growing presence of non-permanent international journalists in North Korea, there has been a growing presence of international wire services in Pyongyang. Asoociated Press opened its first news bureau in Pyongyang in 2012. In 2016, Agence France-Presse (AFP) followed suit. While Associated Press was hardly the first foreign news bureau in Pyongyang (China’s Xinhua news agency, Russia’s ITAR- TASS news agency and Japan’s Kyodo news agency have all maintained a presence in Pyongyang for many years), both AFP and AP have been controversial additions to Pyongyang’s foreign news gallery.
In the context of this essay, the Associated Press bureau in Pyongyang matters not only because they are a news agency in Pyongyang but also because the arguments around the setting up of the bureau reflect the broader arguments in international relations and foreign policy studies about how to deal with North Korea. For a more detailed overview of this argument, refer to Chubb and Yeo (2019). The argument around AP in Pyongyang becomes the site of an ideological struggle between those who believe the best approach to dealing with North Korea is through engagement and those who believe the country should be isolated and starved of outside resources and trade through the imposition of sanctions.
These two approaches are best personified by Jean Lee (founding AP Pyongyang bureau chief) and Joshua Stanton (columnist and former congressional adviser to the Obama administration) who both blur the lines between policy, punditry and journalism.
While none of the journalists interviewed said the existence of an AP bureau in Pyongyang had a demonstrable impact on the way they covered North Korea, the presence and role of the agency in Pyongyang was a divisive issue. When talking to participants about AP in Pyongyang, the dialogue revolved around two central themes: whether AP can actually practise journalism in Pyongyang; and the broader political implications of maintaining a presence in North Korea. The final concern revealed the interviewees’ political stance in relation to engagement with North Korea.
The value of a Pyongyang bureau
All of those who spoke on the issues of the AP and AFP presence in Pyongyang saw these bureaus as distinctive in that they could not function as any normal bureau in any other country. However, these idiosyncrasies did not dampen enthusiasm for maintaining AP in Pyongyang. The question then became: ‘What is the point of maintaining wire services in Pyongyang?’ For some, the answer to the question lay in simply being there. That does not mean they were satisfied with the coverage offered by AP Pyongyang, but they did believe there was a place for news bureaus even under the most draconian of settings. One journalist stood for a pragmatic idealism in making a case for AP staying in Pyongyang, saying:
We absolutely need to be there. The point of the foreign correspondent is to go into the fire and cover things. If you are not doing this, especially on the grounds of principle, then that is just bollocks. Your job is to report what is happening on the ground. Living by these big puritanical principles is completely unhelpful when it comes to doing your job as a journalist.
The ‘big puritanical principles’ this journalist refers to here will be explored in the coming section when the ideological battle characterised by the difference in opinion between Stanton and Lee is discussed.
Some of the interviewees recognised that coverage from bureaus within North Korea made up a small part of the mosaic that comprised the coverage of North Korea. One said: ‘It’s similar to journalists embedding with the US forces in the war in Iraq. If that is the entirety of your coverage of the war then that is a problem.’
This journalist put an onus on there being a diversity of sources of news on North Korea, even if that diversity resulted in questionable stories being published. ‘With all news on North Korea you need to have a keen bullshit detector, and what comes out of AP Pyongyang is no different.’ She makes a good point – there is more than one source of news on North Korea.
For the others, it was important to have a foreign media presence in the country in preparation for the collapse of the Kim regime. They emphasised the benefits of AP having a presence in Berlin during Nazi rule and downfall, and said the same could occur with the eventual downfall of North Korea. In his very direct fashion, Andrei Lankov described AP in Pyongyang as a ‘fake operation’, but he said that mattered little:
At AP all the North Korean staff are security officials. They get their salary through the North Korean intelligence service. It’s still not a problem. Presence on the ground is more important than not being there if and when things start to change. The AP chief of staff is a former intelligence colonel. He is smart, and he will be useful if change happens. The more foreign media on the ground the better even if they have not had access to stories of any substance for half a century.
For some of the journalists interviewed, under the current conditions there was not a lot of point in foreign news agencies operating in North Korea, and one said Stanton’s characterisation of AP’s activities in North Korea as ‘Associated propaganda’, while playful, was not altogether an inaccurate lens through which to view AP’s activities in North Korea. Despite this, some were particularly negative about the AP and AFP maintaining a presence in the north. One prominent journalist said:
I think it would be a mistake for AFP and AP to shut down their bureaus. If another Korean War should break out they will be right on the scene. You know the old adage: ‘In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.’ I think their bureaus are open to a lot of criticism, but I would not say they should not have those bureaus.
There was a general acceptance that AP Pyongyang was under the control of the North Korean government. Among the interviewees there was little argument the coverage of North Korea that emanated and emanates from the Pyongyang AP bureau lacked accuracy and balance. At best, the content lacked a critical perspective on the DPRK and at worst it was nothing more than propaganda for the powers in Pyongyang. One journalist characterised much of Lee’s coverage of North Korea in her time as bureau chief in Pyongyang as nothing more than ‘happy talk’. She said: ‘It was too perky and cliché-featured, which didn’t reveal what was going on there.’ This was a common criticism. Another journalist questioned how many stories on the Pyongyang dolphinarium and exhibitions of portraits of Kim Il-sung and his progeny were too many, in reference to the kind of coverage he saw from the Associated Press wire in Pyongyang. There was also a lot said on who was more effective in the role of bureau chief in Pyongyang – Jean Lee or her successor, the late Eric Talmadge. While the answers to these kinds of questions can be interesting, they do nothing to answer the big question to emerge – to what degree is AP Pyongyang controlled or guided by the North Korean authorities? Again, with the exception of Stanton, the interviewees agreed it was better to maintain a presence in North Korea than not.
‘Boots on the ground’ or ‘Associated propaganda’?
At the vanguard of the attacks on Jean Lee and her former role as Associated Press Pyongyang bureau chief, on Eric Talmadge, and on AP Pyongyang is Joshua Stanton. His hawkish views on the approach the international community should take with North Korea form the basis of his ideological approach and opinions on AP engagement in the country.
Stanton’s attack on AP in Pyongyang through his blog ‘One free Korea’ and numerous opinion pieces in the mainstream news media has come at a number of levels. Like many of the others interviewed as part of this study he has been less than impressed by the coverage coming from AP in North Korea. Across his blog, in news articles and in his interview as part of this study, he cites numerous occasions when the AP team in Pyongyang has been left wanting because of missed and soft stories. Stanton (2016) said:
It is disturbing what AP has not covered. There was the hotel fire. There was the building collapse not long ago. And in 2012 there were rumours of a famine not 20 minutes drive from the bureau office. There have been rumours of purges and the health scares of Kim Jong-un. The AP has given us no elucidation about the truth of these things.
Stanton followed with one of the one-liners he is famous for in North Korean-watching circles: ‘AP in North Korea has told us nothing newsworthy that is exclusive and nothing exclusive that is newsworthy’ (2016).
Stanton’s attack on AP, and most recently AFP, in North Korea rests on the notion that foreign news services in North Korea are not and can never be independent of the North Korean authorities and their staff are, therefore, rendered useless as journalists. In that light, they become instruments of the North Korean propaganda machine.
While Stanton’s ‘propaganda’ thesis in relation to AP’s presence in North Korea may seem extreme, his position is not without precedent. In 2016, German academic, Harriet Scharnberg, caused a firestorm within the international news media and journalism academia after publishing Das A und P: Der propaganda Associated Press und die nationalsozialistische Bildpublizistik [The A and P of propaganda: Associated Press and Nazi photojournalism] (Scharnberg 2016). Scharnberg argued AP went along willingly with the Nazi regime in order to maintain a bureau in the German capital in the years leading up to World War Two. Scharnberg continued, arguing AP were important to overseas Nazi propaganda. She said:
In 1935 the ability of all Anglo-American picture agencies to report from and about Germany was drastically restricted. The Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro purchased the Berlin branch of Keystone View Inc. in 1935, and Wide World Photo closed its Berlin GmbH, or limited liability company, in the same year. The third large news picture agency, Associated Press, chose not to close its Berlin subsidiary. Instead it accepted the Editors’ Law, thus ceding considerable influence over the production of its news pictures to the Ministry of Propaganda both in terms of staff and the content of the images themselves (ibid: 27).
AP was the only foreign news service to maintain a full-time presence in Berlin after ceding all editorial control under the Schriftleitergesetz (Editor’s Law) in 1935. This included terminating the employment of six staff deemed Jewish by Hitler’s administration (Oltermann 2016; Scharnberg 2016). In 2017, AP published a lengthy report defending their decision to continue reporting from Berlin during the run-up to and the duration of World War Two, likening themselves to the world of the US Marine Corps – they are always the last to leave (Victor 2017). There were two distinct periods between 1931 and 1945 that characterised AP’s activities and involvement in Nazi Germany following America’s entry into World War Two in 1941. From 1933-1941, American AP staff were able to operate in Nazi Germany subject to restrictions on movement and censorship. After the United States declared war on Axis Japan in the wake of the Japanese bombing raids on Pearl Harbor, the five American AP staff working in Germany were imprisoned to be freed in a prisoner exchange the following year. What remained of AP’s staff and operations in Germany were absorbed into the Waffen SS. In 1942 the German government entered into an agreement with AP in neutral Portugal to distribute and disseminate photographs produced by the remnants of the AP within the Waffen SS.
In defending their involvement with Nazi Germany in different capacities from 1933 to 1941, Associated Press said:
AP covers the world, which includes dictatorships and democracies, countries at war and countries at peace. This means AP journalists need to cover authoritarian governments and undemocratic political movements from within borders that these regimes control. This was the struggle of the Berlin bureau in the years 1933–41. This review of the historical data leads to the conclusion that AP succeeded in its journalistic mission in spite of the turmoil of the period and the enormous pressures the AP staff faced (Associated Press 2017).
Certainly, it is unfair to judge AP by the standards of another age. However, whether AP see themselves as the metaphorical ‘Marines of journalism’ or not, the fact remains they cooperated and colluded with an odious regime that saw them as a vehicle for spreading propaganda to the rest of the world (Berlin 2016; Wiseman 2017).
In 2014, veteran American journalist, the late Nate Thayer leaked a copy of the draft memorandum of understanding between the Associated Press and the North Korean government through the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) (Thayer 2014). The paper revealed AP in Pyongyang was an organ of the KCNA with AP ceding editorial independence in return for being allowed to maintain an in-country presence. The draft MOU was explicit in that the relationship with the AP would ‘serve the purpose of the coverage and worldwide distribution of policies of the Worker’s Party of Korea and the DPRK government’ (Thayer 2014).
In both pre-World War Two Germany and contemporary North Korea AP has willingly entered into contracts with despotic governments. In both cases AP has allowed themselves to become manipulated to the point that the independence of their editorial policy in relation to these countries has been called into question. Against this backdrop, Stanton’s charge that the ‘P’ in AP has more in common with propaganda than ‘press’ could be sustained.
Since becoming the founding bureau chief of AP Pyongyang in 2012, Jean Lee has received intense scrutiny and criticism. Lee was reluctant to be drawn into the impact AP Pyongyang naysayers had had on her except to say she found the relentless criticism of her work in Pyongyang tiring. She said the market for journalism on North Korea was not at a point where there was an appetite anything other than extreme entertainment-driven stories on the country.
Lee said part of her mission in reporting on both North Korea and South Korea was bringing a greater awareness to her readers as to the complexity of the Korean situation and conditions on both sides of the demilitarised zone (DMZ). If this meant telling positive stories about North Korea as a country and a people, so be it. In her interview Lee said the role of the journalist was to provide balanced context in reporting and to not shy away from reporting something on the grounds of ideology or principle. Lee said:
The question of whether we can truly report from North Korea is a difficult one, but we can’t consider ourselves true journalists if we don’t try. We need to be on the ground. It is different from covering it from outside. That said, the North Korean regime keeps foreigners separate from locals and manages the flow of information. The basic challenge was getting candid information you could trust – you can’t just report what you see.
Lee went on to talk about the challenges of reporting in an environment where she was under constant surveillance, there was no freedom of movement and she was viewed by the state as a double enemy – first for being American and second for being a journalist. Despite these impediments and the howls of her critics, Lee maintains there is a place for journalists on the ground in North Korea. Lee said:
Just being there is pushing the boundaries. For them to allow a journalist from an enemy nation to come and set up shop is an important first step. Being there day in and day out was an achievement. Every little thing is a hard-won battle when it comes to North Korea.
The battle Lee refers to here is the battle of engagement with North Korea. For Lee, engagement is a slow burn, and in her role of reporting from the country, the symbolic value of being there, was an achievement. By her own admission she was actively blocked from covering the kinds of stories she wanted to.
What was more important for Lee was being there and the prospect of building a lasting relationship that over time would lead to more freedom for her successors and a corresponding increase in trust in foreign correspondents living and working in North Korea. To this end, she said what she hoped for upon leaving her job in Pyongyang was that her successor would continue her work with the same vision. Lee sees direct engagement in North Korea as the best way to deal with the state, and this forms one half of the ideological binary introduced at the beginning of this section.
Eric Talmadge was far less circumspect. For Talmadge, the job of being Pyongyang bureau chief was a job, albeit a job working under very unusual conditions. Talmadge said:
It’s a lonely job. You’re surrounded by people all the time. You’re being watched all the time. And yet, you are a journalist expected to report the impossible to an audience raised on Kim Jong-un memes. This is the most frustrating job I’ve had.
Conclusion
As Fifield argues in The great successor (2019b), reporting on North Korea from inside the country is an idiosyncratic enterprise characterised by a highly restrictive reporting environment. And yet, AP and AFP are among an exclusive group of news organisations maintaining news bureaus in the DPRK. Although some had a hard time seeing the immediate value in terms of news, almost all the journalists I interviewed said they had no fundamental objections to AP being in the country. In fact, for some, allowing journalism to happen for the sake of journalism and despite the obvious impediments to the craft was an end unto itself. This was especially true for former AP Pyongyang bureau chiefs, Jean Lee and Eric Talmadge, whose journalism embodied an ‘engagement first’ perspective. Working under the most difficult and isolated conditions, both shared a desire to pave the way for journalists to report on North Korea with balance and fairness. For both, the job in Pyongyang was their last in journalism. Jean Lee went to work for the Brookings Institute in Washington D.C. while on 16 May 2019 Eric Talmadge passed away near his home in Yokohama, Japan.
At the other end of the ideological spectrum was Joshua Stanton. At first glance, Stanton’s views on AP in Pyongyang seem overly deterministic and rigid. Set against AP’s engagement with Nazi Germany in the years prior to World War Two (Scharnberg 2016), Stanton’s views become much more understandable and raise important questions over what kind of ethical lines Associated Press would cross in having ‘boots on the ground’.
Questions of ethics aside, the quantity of content coming out of Pyongyang is small. Lee is right in arguing that what emanates from AP in North Korea forms a small part of a much bigger mosaic of content on North Korea. This is especially true in a networked news environment (Murray 2020) where innumerable threads of news and information on the country constitute a complex narrative tapestry.
References
Associated Press (2017) Covering tyranny: The AP and Nazi Germany, 1933-1945. Available online at https://www.ap.org/about/history/ap-in- germany-1933-1945/ap-in- germany-report.pdf
Berlin, D. C. (2016) US press agency made deal with Hitler; Germany, The Times, 30 March p. 28
Chubb, Danielle and Yeo, Andrew (2019) Human rights, nuclear security and the question of engagement with North Korea, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 3 pp 227-233
Fifield, Anna (2019) The great successor: The secret rise and rule of Kim Jong Un, London, Hachette UK
Lankov, Andrei (2013) The real North Korea: Life and politics in the failed Stalinist utopia, Oxford, Oxford University Press
Murray, Richard (2020) Constructions of good and evil: The Koreas in international news, PhD Thesis, School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. DOI: 10.14264/uql.2020.910
Oltermann, Philip (2016) Revealed: How Associated Press cooperated with the Nazis, Guardian, March 30. Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ mar/30/associated-press- cooperation-nazis-revealed-germany-harriet-scharnberg
Scharnberg, Harriet (2016) The A and P of propaganda: Associated Press and Nazi propaganda, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Vol. 13, No. 1. Available online at https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/1-2016/5324
Smith, Hazel (2015) North Korea: Markets and military rule, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Thayer, Nate (2014) The Associated Press in North Korea: A Potemkin news bureau? NK News, December 24. Available online at http://www.nknews.org/2014/12/the- associated-press-in-northkorea-a-potemkin-news-bureau/
Tudor, Daniel and Pearson, James (2015) North Korea confidential: Private markets, fashion trends, prison camps, dissenters and defectors, Tokyo, Tuttle
Wiseman, Paul (2017) Associated Press accused of cooperating with the Nazis, World War 2, Vol. 32, No. 3 pp 10-11
Funding and support
This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-OLU-2250002).
Notes on the contributors
Dr Richard Murray is a Lecturer in Digital Journalism at the University of Queensland where he also serves as Journalism Program Convenor. He researches regional and rural journalism, media law and international journalism. Before coming to academia, Richard worked as a journalist across the Asia-Pacific.
Associate Professor Dong Bae Lee teaches in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland and runs the Korean Language Program. Lee conducts research into the critical analysis of language (English, Korean and Chinese) textbooks and curriculum, postcolonial drama in Korea, language policy, multiculturalism in the school curriculum, North Korean defectors, North Korean education and school curriculum.