Posted on blog.jinbo.net
Yesterday’s Guardian (UK) had following piece about Absurdistan’s (aka D.P.R.K.) “news” agency:
North Korean state news agency’s feed offers a glimpse into the mind of a repressive regime
North Korea is renowned for many things – not least surprise nuclear tests – but it can hardly claim to be at the forefront of the information technology revolution.
While the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il, boasts of being a whiz on the web, internet access is otherwise all but unknown in a country where the state keeps the tightest of grips on the flow of information. Pyongyang, the capital, has a couple of – heavily monitored – internet cafes, while North Korea’s recently allocated .kp country code only came into existence in 2007.
It thus comes as a slight surprise to browse Twitter and find a feed from the country’s state press organisation, the Korean Central News Agency.
If you have never previously perused its daily digest of news, available in English and Spanish, as well as Korean, KCNA at first looks astonishingly anachronistic, a shrill blast of propaganda reminiscent of the depths of the cold war. Americans are always reviled as the “imperialists”, while South Korea is the “puppet regime” which, to use a phrase from one of today’ stories, is “dancing to the tune of the US”.
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