Media vs State in North Korea

So! Last week we were assigned to look at the relationship between state and media in different countries and coincidentally my group got North Korea, right after I had spent the previous night reading about the media censorship and foreign journalist stories of said country. Talk about luck!

Since Satu did a great job in creating a visually pleasing presentation, I'm gonna use it as visual assets for the post. Thank you Satu for your work! :)

All media in North Korea is owned by its state and government. There nominally is a freedom of speech but the practice of it is prohibited unless it praises the country and its leader.

Since all news outlets are owned by the state the flow of information is heavily filtered and regulated. TV sets and radios are distributed and checked by the government and they are pre-tuned to a chosen few channels. Actual internet access is restricted basically to political figures, and instead the state has created a substitute "intranet" that only shows a number of allowed websites and information to the users (who mainly consist of selected students, factory workers and few selected individuals.

In addition to internal censorship the state also attempts to control foreign journalists and what information gets outside the country by controlling their movements and inspecting their image files before exiting the country.

All media content must go through the inspection of KCNA (the Korean Central News Agency) and possible heavy altering before it is published. All journalists must prove to be ideologically clean, be part of the Worker's Party of Korea and come from politically reliable families - only the Worker's Party has free speech in addition to the leader. As stated before, also foreign journalists are under tight supervision.

As a conclusion, let's not go to North Korea. 'Tis a silly place.

#media #northkorea