On 38 North, Michael Madden suggests recent North Korean coverage might be a bit over the top:
Prior to the Singapore Summit, the biggest news about the DPRK concerned a personnel shuffle of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) High Command. Some of the coverage of these changes, obviously targeted on a general audience, was misleading. According to recent commentary, Kim Jong Un, the “brutal dictator,” had once again embarked on a bloody purge of senior officials.
A more coherent and accurate interpretation of Kim Jong Un’s rationale was that he switched his top military leaders as part of the preliminary phase of mothballing the DPRK’s WMD program; there is a certain logic to moving malcontents to other positions, lest they resist Kim’s moves on denuclearization. However, this was only a minor factor in Kim Jong Un’s calculations. …
If the shorter time periods are considered, then this is a characteristic similar to other political systems, democratic and totalitarian alike. When the longer time periods are considered, the institutions in question go through periods of interim or transitional management to facilitate a smooth arrival for the new boss. In any event, these changes are not undertaken rashly; rather, they are deliberate and well-planned. This personnel management method—which is highly risk-averse—is one of the foundations of the DPRK political system’s resilience and survival. This lends itself in watching leadership activity in state media to occasionally seeing political dead men walking. Some conceal their alienation better than others.
In other words, Kim is settling into the job, and the job is settling out around him. Reading every personnel move as cold-blooded murder leaves open the question Why hasn’t the rest of the leadership just shot Kim in the head and moved on? To suggest that every change in high leadership is an occasion for blood ignores the problems engendered by such an unsettling way of changing people around. And, if the media is being appropriate proctored, it leaves them with egg on their face.
But we don’t proctor them. We’ve confused media with entertainment in some crucial ways, and unless we backtrack and disentangle news from entertainment, and understand that the former can be deadly serious, we’ll never really see improvements in coverage.
