SEOUL, South Korea — Fans of North Korea’s state media should brace for fewer images of a beaming Kim Jong-un and less focus on matters that, to Western eyes, are amusingly weird and wacky.
Aware that some images and media segments from the isolated, authoritarian state have become objects of ridicule in the wider world, Pyongyang propaganda czars are raising their game, a leading South Korean scholar said.
Despite their sometimes alternative-universe takes on the news, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and other North Korean outlets are scrutinized by outsiders for signs of what the opaque, often inscrutable Kim regime wants its population to know.
“My analysis does not show any traces of freedom of North Korean media control from the state,” Tatiana Gabroussenko, a professor of North Korean studies at Seoul’s elite Korea University, said in a briefing for foreign reporters. “However, that does not mean North Korean media stays completely unchanged and does not experience any transformation.”
Propaganda by no means has disappeared from the daily North Korean news diet. The top stories from KCNA and other state media outlets Wednesday included a new issue of stamps marketing the regime’s 75th anniversary, the strong state of the economy and the government’s disaster relief efforts, a congratulatory message from Mr. Kim to the nation’s centenarians, and an article in the Minju Joson newspaper praising Mr. Kim as a “peerless patriot who opened up the new era of a dignified, powerful nation.”
Ms. Gabroussenko, who has spent 30 years viewing North Korea’s strictly controlled media landscape, said the current generation of news managers is taking lessons from capitalist counterparts overseas.
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“Recently, we see them actively imitating foreign media to make North Korean versions more emotional and appealing,” she said. “They are pioneering new forms or genres, imitating Hollywood, South Korean dramas and TikTok.”
Coils of yellow goo
Many around the world were struck by the “Top Gun”-style production values of a 2022 video featuring the portly Mr. Kim, decked out in a black leather jacket and sunglasses, co-starring with a giant intercontinental ballistic missile and its transporter-erector launcher. Pacing in slow-motion in front of the weapon’s impressive hangar, Mr. Kim and his generals count down the seconds on their watches before the missile rises majestically into the heavens.
Even mainstream Western media could not resist running that clip, in full, on their sites.
The North’s new coverage also mirrors details of overseas news. A recent photo of a briefing for Mr. Kim in front of another missile blurs out the face of a strategic forces official, presumably for security reasons.
The emerging trend may disappoint overseas viewers, dulling the uniqueness of the official media’s adulatory coverage of Mr. Kim and life in North Korea.
A viral set of images from 2014 shows Mr. Kim beaming in apparent delight as coils of yellow sludge are excreted from a pipe at a lubricant factory. A set of photos showing him grinning broadly amid a group of apparently star-struck female soldiers sparked ridicule abroad, as did another featuring the North Korean leader sandwiched between huge stacks of medicinal mushrooms.
The North is phasing out such unintentionally comic images.
“My feeling is North Koreans are very careful at seeing what the world writes about them when they became the object of fun,” Ms. Gabroussenko said.
Even Mr. Kim’s grin is less omnipresent. “There are no more cheesy political smiles, more natural images,” she said.
The new look was evident in the North’s coverage of Mr. Kim’s trip to flooded areas struck by a typhoon this month. Rather than flashing his pearly whites, the national leader looks grave as locals tell him of the damage.
The state hierarchy is suppressing its long-standing practice of “on-the-spot guidance,” in which Mr. Kim briefs reverential officials and officers as they dutifully scribble down his wisdom in notebooks.
“Now, more and more leaders and officials are involved in the same thing,” Ms. Gabroussenko said.
The turgid nature of propaganda is also getting a makeover. Because of the shortened attention span of the YouTube and TikTok generation, North Korean editors are slashing their reports into faster-paced, bite-sized chunks.
Ms. Gabroussenko noted that news segments of the regime’s typical collectivist themes are now just two minutes long. Coverage of items such as a couple who adopt an ill girl, a woman who marries a disabled soldier or citizens heroically donating blood for burn victims would have merited 80-minute reports in the past. Broadcasts of sports, parades and industrial achievements are also getting quicker editorial hooks.
Some trends are in flux. In 2015, the song “Three Years of War” featured lyrics and a video detailing the horrors of war — bombs falling, a dead mother, a sobbing child — that were strongly at odds with the triumphalist tone of the state’s prior Korean War content. The timbre swiftly reverted with the revival of an old song with upbeat music called “Pretty Girl” about a maiden who hurls herself under an enemy tank.
“The words and the images were completely incongruent,” Ms. Gabroussenko said.
The reporter’s job
Like their global colleagues, media content generators in Pyongyang want their stories well presented and widely viewed, but other comparisons fall short.
North Korean journalists are “not creative individuals running around the place. They are serious people,” the professor said. “When a journalist visits a workplace or a home, it is almost equal to the visit of a [Workers’] Party inspector. They should be treated with great respect.”
Reporters have little benefit in presenting a unique vision, specialist knowledge or a scoop.
“There is no concept of a hot fact which they have to hunt after,” Ms. Gabroussenko said. “Sensationalism is considered bad in North Korea. … The ultimate rule is working for social harmony and stability of society.”
So accustomed are they to this approach that North Koreans who defect south are sometimes shocked at displays of social freedom, such as the mass protests against President Park Geun-hye in 2016 and 2017.
“They considered this sensationalism a little bit disturbing,” she said. “They asked how a president could work in such a destabilized society.”
Ms. Gabroussenko said a closer comparison of North Korean journalists would be to public relations professionals in the West.
“It would be most precise to compare them to an advertising agent, to do things in the most creative, active, interesting form and try to develop all forms of media for that,” she said.
Upgrades in production are stylistic, not indicative of substantive shifts in the Kim regime.
It’s “a revolution in form, but not content,” Ms. Gabroussenko said.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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