Media coverage of North Korea

Media coverage of North Korea is hampered by a lack of reliable information. There are a number of reasons for this. Media access to the country is severely restricted. A key for information about North Korea is the testimony of defectors, but defectors are not necessarily reliable. Much information about North Korea is filtered through South Korea, but the longstanding conflict between the two countries distorts the information that is received.

Media coverage is hampered by a lack of reliable information. The verification of facts is notoriously difficult. For example, researcher Christopher Green has described trying to confirm a story about Vice Marshal Ri Yong-ho being killed in a firefight in Pyongyang in 2012, but being unable to find a source there that knew about it. Even intelligence agencies struggle with the task. Former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, National Security Adviser, and CIA officer Donald Gregg has described North Korea as the "longest-running intelligence failure in the history of US espionage". Former CIA director Robert Gates called it the "toughest intelligence target in the world".

Isaac Stone Fish of Foreign Policy has described the country as an "information black hole". According to Ralph Cossa, president of the Pacific Forum of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "Anyone who tells you that they know anything for certain about North Korea is either trying to kid you or trying to kid themselves." Analyst Andrei Lankov has compared reporting North Korea to the parable of the blind men and an elephant, with analysts falsely extrapolating from limited data. Several authors have referred to a North Korean "rumor mill". South Korean journalists and media experts have described this as a "systemic problem".

Due to the popularity of North Korean news, however, stories are frequently widely circulated in the global media with minimal fact-checking or analysis.

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Wikipedia