It’s just another day for members of North Korea’s state-controlled media, whose singular job is to chronicle Kim’s every move — to make him appear wise, statesmanlike and generally infallible. If the North Korean state media team had anything on Kim, they weren’t about to share it with outside journalists. Their job, simply, is to follow the North Korean strongman “as if their life depended on it,” said Joo Seong-ha, who fled North Korea nearly two decades ago and writes about North Korean affairs for the South Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo. In 2017, a North Korean court sentenced two South Korean journalists to death in absentia over unflattering reports on the Kim regime. Photos of Kim’s first day in Vietnam were splashed across the front page of North Korea’s state-run Rodong Sinmun.

Source: Washington Post February 28, 2019 06:56 UTC