How difficult is journalism in North Korea?

South Korean TV reports on North Korea's fifth nuclear test. Most news from North Korea is very mysterious even to international news agencies based in Pyongyang /// Reuters

North Korea has long been a secretive country, with very limited information available. This makes important information such as cyber security and especially Pyongyang's missile and nuclear tests often come as a shock, such as the fifth nuclear test this September.

In an article published on September 15, Mr. Choe Sang-hun, head of the Seoul bureau of The New York Times (USA), shared his experiences about the difficulties in "extracting information" from North Korea.

North Korea’s nuclear test took place at the same time that South Korean President Park Geun-hye visited Laos, and had to cut short her trip to return home to deal with the situation. This shows that the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) was also unable to promptly inform about their country’s top security issue from across the border.

The only thing South Korea has to keep in mind is that North Korea could act at any time. For months, the South Korean Defense Ministry has set a standard for answering questions about the threat in the safest way: North Korea will act whenever leader Kim Jong-un orders it, Choe Sang-hun said.

One of the events that most discredited the South Korean intelligence agency was the death of former leader Kim Jong-il. Everyone only learned about the incident after the North Korean side announced the incident two days after Kim Jong-il passed away.

For decades, the United States has relied on satellite imagery to gather information about North Korea’s nuclear tests, scanning the Punggye-ri hilltop site where North Korea conducts underground tests. Much of the information it has gathered has been inaccurate.

Meanwhile, “outside forces” such as the AP and Kyodo news agencies both have offices in the North Korean capital Pyongyang. However, their reporters are not allowed to meet people there, nor are they allowed to travel freely.

The sensational, shockingly negative stories about North Korea that have appeared in the foreign press so far have often come from defectors. The accounts of defectors are of course difficult to verify, although they are often paid to tell their experiences. Furthermore, most defectors do not belong to the group of people with sufficient knowledge of valuable political, military, and nuclear information.

For information released by North Korean media, it is difficult for the West and surrounding countries to verify, because they are also afraid of being propagated. On the contrary, the NIS often causes trouble for foreign media. It is said that when the NIS releases information that does not match the source announced by North Korea, it defends that it cannot... verify the information. In addition, because it works for South Korea, the NIS is not highly regarded for its neutrality, according to a journalist from The New York Times.

For example, in recent months, South Korea has reported on high-ranking North Korean officials defecting or executing officials in the country. But Andray Abrahamian, who works for the Choson Exchange, an organization that provides legal aid and other business-related issues in North Korea, warns that much of the information is sensational.

“North Korea’s ambiguity makes it easy to start rumors, while corroboration is often difficult. Readers’ fascination with North Korea, and especially its crude news, makes it difficult for reporters and editors to resist repeating rumors when they stray too far from the story, and thus become less likely to take responsibility for the information,” Abrahamian wrote.

Given these difficulties, The New York Times, when operating in the region, said that the first thing they did was to track down a sensational story. But according to Choe Sang-hun, such information often comes from a report from South Korea, claiming that their source was an anonymous individual. This is both difficult to verify and potentially subject to distortion by the South Korean side. The most classic story is probably the "sensational" story about leader Kim Jong-un having his uncle torn to pieces by dogs in 2014.

According to Thanh Nien