Pyongyang Pollyanna

First there was Tokyo Rose, then Hanoi Jane. I now nominate the world's news media for the title of "Pyongyang Pollyanna."

Yes. I admit that I have been talking a lot about media bias in this blog lately. But today, I am talking about reporting on a rogue state playing around with nuclear warheads and missile delivery systems, and backed by China besides. Call it laziness. Call it wishful thinking. Call it what you will. But three short reports I encountered today aren't exactly stellar examples of a free press keeping the people informed.

Is North Korea about to test the nuclear weapons it has been feverishly developing? If you read only the Houston Chronicle, you might think that such reports are scare-mongering. Whatever you think, some damning evidence to the contrary is missing.

North Korea on Tuesday dismissed reports that it was preparing a nuclear test, calling them U.S. propaganda, and blamed Washington for the impasse in international talks to disarm the hardline state.

"The United States is making noise, saying that our country will have an underground nuclear test in June and it will notify the International Atomic Energy Agency, Japan and other related countries," the North's main state-run Rodong Sinmun daily wrote in a commentary, according to the country's official Korean Central News Agency.

The U.S. government intends to brand North Korea as "a 'nuclear criminal' by all means, gang up against us and try to stifle us," the newspaper wrote, calling Washington's position "propaganda."

Poor, persecuted North Korea! There goes that damned Bush war machine, stirring up rumors again. If you go to another media outlet, though, you get a missing piece of that story and are left wondering why that part of the news about the A-bomb somehow wasn't fit to print in H-town.

But a North Korean official told visiting Japanese scholars in Pyongyang last week that a nuclear test was an "indispensable" step toward proving the nation's military capabilities to the world and suggested his government might conduct one soon, [emphasis mine] according to the Japanese head of the delegation.

So they're about to test a nuke. They say so and it really doesn't make sense to build one if it's a dud, does it? What might our "allies," the Chinese, be gearing up to do? They must be terribly worried, what with a rogue nuclear state next door and all!

Not quite. I mentioned Sunday that China offered us a very lame excuse for not cutting off oil to Pyongyang. Today, our State Department denied that report, but did confirm that they are asking China to think about helping us, and at that, merely to get North Korea back to the six-party talks, which have been stalled for most of the past year.

Washington has made no secret that it was counting largely on China to woo Pyongyang back to the stalled six-party nuclear talks that also include Japan, Russia and South Korea.

"What we have done is ask the Chinese to think about the full sort of set of tools in the box that they can use to get the North Koreans to come back to the table," the State Department official said.

"There are a lot of things that are out there that are possibilities," the official said. He did not elaborate.

Well, his last sentence is correct, and one of those possibilities is that we stop going through North Korea's main accomplice, China. This is, of course, nowhere on the radar. The huge amount of time the talks have been stalled vis-à-vis the projected timetable for North Korea to finish its work on the bomb is only vaguely hinted at. Sounds like our government is, to use a media phrase I kept hearing after the September 11 atrocities, asleep at the switch, doesn't it? The headline? "US steps up pressure on China over North Korea." The news media aren't exactly sounding the alarm are they? If they're doing anything, it's hitting the snooze button.

Be that as it may, this news story ("North Korea removes hurdle to 6-party talks") reports that North Korea has dropped one of its excuses not even to play the six-party charade ....

North Korea has apparently lifted an obstacle to the resumption of negotiations to end the nuclear standoff by dropping a precondition demanding separate direct talks with the United States.

... while burying two interesting facts. (1) That North Korea, with whom we are talking -- with a straight face -- about holding good-faith negotiations, "dropped" its demand by telling a bald-faced lie about it.

"We have never requested the DPRK (North Korea)-US talks independent of the six-way talks," a foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement published y the official Korean Central News Agency.

Why do we want talks with a nation whose officials seem to view the spoken word as a means of deception rather than communication of facts? (2) That, even if we assume that telling a lie is merely the way the North Koreans "save face," they still have, in truth, merely replaced one obstacle with another!

North Korea has said it will not return to the negotiating table unless there is an apology from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for labeling the Stalinist country as an "outpost of tyranny" earlier this year.

Perhaps we could call them a "Zombie State" instead! (HT: TIA Daily) Joking aside, the term would far more accurately reflect both China's and North Korea's positions in this farce.

From Burma to Nepal to Zimbabwe, China is providing political, diplomatic, and security support to failing dictatorships. Beijing gives just enough help for the dictator to survive sanctions and domestic popular revolts, while the PRC gains a dependent state.

[And, from near the end of the article.] Burma and North Korea have been zombies so long that they may now be in permanent vegetative states, but the persistence of these two regimes beyond their long-expected demise is a clear demonstration of the efficacy of China's policy. Burma has been under strict international sanctions since it violently suppressed a popular revolt in 1988, but there is no sign of the junta's imminent collapse. North Korea's economy completely failed in the 1990s, starving to death an estimated 1.5 million people, but Kim Jong Il blithely clings to power and is grooming his son as a successor.

Why the hell do we have to go to a partisan media outlet before we see the dots connected between China and North Korea?

So let me get this straight. Even from the second news report above, we know that China is propping up North Korea. We know that North Korea comes up with cockamamie excuses (and then lies about doing so) to avoid negotiations that they'd honor just like their agreement with Clinton anyway. And we're still trying to hold just the talks that might produce another such agreement?

Let me rephrase this. China is helping North Korea develop an atom bomb and the means to deliver it. Meanwhile we're begging for a chance to speak with both. I know Bush was well-received recently on his visit to Georgia, but I sure wish he'd back up his words of support for freedom -- our freedom -- with something more than this.

In any event, the press sure isn't getting the word out well enough that the American people will even know there's a problem. How do we hold Bush's feet to the fire if we don't even know that we need to? Just how much help are China and North Korea going to get in the enterprise of blowing somebody up, anyway?

-- CAV

Updates

5-11-05: Fixed formatting error and a typo.
5-13-05: Fixed a typo (HT: Adrian Hester).