The mainstream media cozies up to North Korea

[Charles]

I read the articles. I noticed you just did like charles and selected a sentence out of context that said what you wanted to say while accusing Breitbart of doing the exact same thing! And not only that but you selectively avoided doing the same to the main articles and chose some oddball ones like New Yorker and ThinkProgress.

You are just as bad as you accuse Brietbart of being. Shame on you.

I think you completely missed the point, Sparko. I only need those quotes in order to show that Breitbart got it wrong when it wrote stuff like:

Yep, over the weekend, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, ABC, NBC, PBS, even the Wall Street Journal… these big media outlets (and more) colluded with murderous North Korean tyrants to normalize their slave state, to romanticize a murderous regime that comes complete with concentration camps, public executions in the thousands, and actual slaves.

Yep, over the weekend, the same media outlets that see only evil in Trump’s every utterance, colluded with a North Korea that regularly threatens our nuclear annihilation (and is aggressively seeking the means to do so), that starves and tortures its own people by the millions, and is in reality a massive prison camp disguised as a country.

Read the quotes again after reading what Breitbart actually wrote. You might start to see the point.

[Sparko]

I think you completely missed the point, Sparko. I only need those quotes in order to show that Breitbart got it wrong when it wrote stuff like:



Read the quotes again after reading what Breitbart actually wrote. You might start to see the point.

Oh I agree that the breitbart article was very biased and misleading. Just like your and PM's responses were. You two are no better. congrats.

[Charles]

Yeah let's ACTUALLY read the article, not just YOUR snippet.

(CNN)If "diplomatic dance" were an event at the Winter Olympics, Kim Jong Un's younger sister would be favored to win gold.
With a smile, a handshake and a warm message in South Korea's presidential guest book, Kim Yo Jong has struck a chord with the public just one day into the PyeongChang Games.

"I hope Pyongyang and Seoul get closer in our people's hearts and move forward the future of prosperous unification," she said in her guest book message, referring to the capitals of North and South Korea.
Seen by some as her brother's answer to American first daughter Ivanka Trump, Kim, 30, is not only a powerful member of Kim Jong Un's kitchen cabinet but also a foil to the perception of North Korea as antiquated and militaristic.

But as North Korea's brutal dictator, Kim's brother has ruled with an iron fist since coming to power, operating Nazi-style prison camps, repressing political opposition and even executing senior officers and his own family members in an effort to consolidate power.

In Pyeongchang, her presence is a major story line for reporters and the buzz on the street, with some in South Korea curious and accepting, while others are skeptical, if not downright cynical.
"Her being here is not that bad, but I feel North Korea has shown up to the Olympics without paying," said Yoon Jun-young, 23, indicating that the nation hasn't made any political concessions to mirror its participation on the international sporting stage.
Kate Yoo, 21, who like Yoon spoke to CNN during Saturday's hockey match between Switzerland and the unified Korean team, said she doesn't think it's "the best thing to have her here, although maybe part of having one of the Kim dynasty over is like a safeguard, then they won't attack."

Other than that small aside which you quoted, the entire article is CNN gushing all over her. Just like Breitbart said.

Just like Breitbart said? Let me remind you what Breitbart said: 'In other words, CNN ran North Korean propaganda as a straight-up news story, without reservations or a single word of criticism.' CNN wrote: "But as North Korea's brutal dictator, Kim's brother has ruled with an iron fist since coming to power, operating Nazi-style prison camps, repressing political opposition and even executing senior officers and his own family members in an effort to consolidate power." I would think this qualifies as "a single word of criticism" to say the least. That was my point. I think it is quite hard to refute it.

[Charles]

Oh I agree that the breitbart article was very biased and misleading. Just like your and PM's responses were. You two are no better. congrats.

If you look at what I actually did I provided actual examples of what was in those articles as an answer to Breitbarts claims. If you like to find that biased and misleading feel free.

[Sparko]

Just like Breitbart said? Let me remind you what Breitbart said: 'In other words, CNN ran North Korean propaganda as a straight-up news story, without reservations or a single word of criticism.' CNN wrote: "But as North Korea's brutal dictator, Kim's brother has ruled with an iron fist since coming to power, operating Nazi-style prison camps, repressing political opposition and even executing senior officers and his own family members in an effort to consolidate power." I would think this qualifies as "a single word of criticism" to say the least. That was my point. I think it is quite hard to refute it.

ok. First you have confused two different MM posts. You responded to post #7 which mentions the sentence about
'In other words, CNN ran North Korean propaganda as a straight-up news story, without reservations or a single word of criticism.'
Which is in the first paragraph of the breitbart article he linked to in post #7 and is referring to a different CNN story than you were quoting from:

"The media’s bizarre swoon over the crisp black suits, aristocratic poise, and “deadly side-eye” of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong was stunning and offensive to sane people everywhere, but it is not difficult to understand. The media hate President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence and will reflexively make common cause with anyone who can make them look bad. Along those lines, CNN ran a Trump and Pence-bashing piece on Monday morning sourced entirely to “a senior diplomatic source close to North Korea.”

The link from the CNN article in MM's breitbart article:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/02/12/a...mpression=true

And you responded to that post with a CNN article he quoted in post #1 about the 15 different articles which had the CNN quote you posted about the criticism to NK.

At least you could actually respond to the correct post with the correct links and the correct articles.

[Charles]

If it is a confusion you find yourself in it in this thread: http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...l=1#post517366

I actually pointed out the quote was from the CNN coverage which is more general than the particular article. However the point is that CNN coverage is not propaganda when it comes to North Korean matters. The articles should of course be viewed in the context in which they are published in which they are stories among other stories.

However, if you want to restrict me to the particular CNN article pointed to in the Breibart article in MM's post 7 then fine by me. Lets have a look at it:

Fred Warmbier accompanied Pence during his visit to South Korea. His son Otto was jailed in North Korea and died upon his return to the US last year after suffering extensive brain damage.https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/02/12/a...mpression=true

There is even a link to this article in the text: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/04/p...ics/index.html

That article contains this quote:

"Otto was systematically tortured and intentionally injured by Kim Jong [Un] ... Kim, and his regime. This was no accident,"

Confront this to Breitbarts claim:

In other words, CNN ran North Korean propaganda as a straight-up news story, without reservations or a single word of criticism.'

[Psychic Missile]

I read the articles. I noticed you just did like charles and selected a sentence out of context that said what you wanted to say while accusing Breitbart of doing the exact same thing! And not only that but you selectively avoided doing the same to the main articles and chose some oddball ones like New Yorker and ThinkProgress.

You are just as bad as you accuse Brietbart of being. Shame on you.

I chose articles that Charles had not covered that were from sources I know well enough and weren't some variation of "the cheerleaders were attention grabbing" which is uncontroversial.

You are accusing me of purposefully using sentences from articles out of context. I would like you to show any evidence at all that the article quotations I provided are out of context.

[Mountain Man]

'The media’s bizarre swoon over the crisp black suits, aristocratic poise, and “deadly side-eye” of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s sister Kim Yo-jong was stunning and offensive to sane people everywhere, but it is not difficult to understand. The media hate President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence and will reflexively make common cause with anyone who can make them look bad. Along those lines, CNN ran a Trump and Pence-bashing piece on Monday morning sourced entirely to “a senior diplomatic source close to North Korea.”

'In other words, CNN ran North Korean propaganda as a straight-up news story, without reservations or a single word of criticism.'

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journal...e-north-korea/

From CNN's coverage:

But as North Korea's brutal dictator, Kim's brother has ruled with an iron fist since coming to power, operating Nazi-style prison camps, repressing political opposition and even executing senior officers and his own family members in an effort to consolidate power.

I can't find this sentence in the CNN story that Breitbart references. Did you perhaps get confused and quote a different story?

Here's the article in question:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/02/12/a...mpression=true

And Breitbart is 100% correct, the story is attributed almost entirely to an unnamed North Korean source and is a wholly uncritical propaganda puff piece that paints North Korea in the best light possible while slamming Vice President Pence.

[Mountain Man]

I'm with Charles. It appears that the Brietbart author just looked at Twitter headlines without reading the articles. More examples:

Twitter headline (Reuters): "North Korea judged winner of diplomatic gold at Olympics"
Article: "That is the assessment of a former South Korean government minister and political experts who say the North has used the Games to drive a wedge between South Korea and its U.S. ally and to potentially ease pressure on its sanctions-crippled state."

Twitter headline (ThinkProgress): "Despite Mike Pence’s sabotage, North Korea’s ‘charm offensive’ appears to be working"
Article: "And while the vice president seems to be dodging diplomatic engagement, the U.S.’s disarmament envoy at the U.N. accused North Korea of a 'charm offensive' that is 'frankly fooling no one.'"

Twitter headline (The New Yorker): "The Mesmerizing Spectacle of North Korea’s “Army of Beauties” cheerleaders 📣 at the Winter Olympics"
Article: "It will be absurd, in Pyeongchang, to watch one of the world’s most repressive, totalitarian nations attempt to deploy two hundred and thirty smiling women as a diplomatic shield."

This is what you should expect if you insulate yourself in propaganda: taking everything they say at face value when even minimal effort would prove them wrong. Ironic considering the subject matter.

But why would the mainstream media choose those quotes and phrases to promote on Twitter? Quotes and phrases that portray North Korea in the best light while being openly critical of our own Vice President? And even the articles themselves range from fawning and enthusiastic to gently critical of North Korea, and any article that mentions Vice President Pence is clearly siding with North Korea and against the United States. I didn't find a single article from the list provided by Breitbart that attempted even a tepid defense of America's diplomacy. Kim Jong Un could not have asked for better propaganda.

[lilpixieofterror]

But why would the mainstream media choose those quotes and phrases to promote on Twitter? Quotes and phrases that portray North Korea in the best light while being openly critical of our own Vice President? And even the articles themselves range from fawning and enthusiastic to gently critical of North Korea, and any article that mentions Vice President Pence is clearly siding with North Korea and against the United States. I didn't find a single article from the list provided by Breitbart that attempted even a tepid defense of America's diplomacy. Kim Jong Un could not have asked for better propaganda.

What do you expect from the same media that praised Hitler, Stalin, and Mao?

[Charles]

But why would the mainstream media choose those quotes and phrases to promote on Twitter? Quotes and phrases that portray North Korea in the best light while being openly critical of our own Vice President? And even the articles themselves range from fawning and enthusiastic to gently critical of North Korea, and any article that mentions Vice President Pence is clearly siding with North Korea and against the United States. I didn't find a single article from the list provided by Breitbart that attempted even a tepid defense of America's diplomacy. Kim Jong Un could not have asked for better propaganda.

There is a huge difference between being "gently critical" and doing what Breitbart said they did. Breitbart made this claim:

Yep, over the weekend, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, ABC, NBC, PBS, even the Wall Street Journal… these big media outlets (and more) colluded with murderous North Korean tyrants to normalize their slave state, to romanticize a murderous regime that comes complete with concentration camps, public executions in the thousands, and actual slaves.

Yep, over the weekend, the same media outlets that see only evil in Trump’s every utterance, colluded with a North Korea that regularly threatens our nuclear annihilation (and is aggressively seeking the means to do so), that starves and tortures its own people by the millions, and is in reality a massive prison camp disguised as a country.

As I pointed out, it simply is not true: http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...l=1#post517344

[Leonhard]

Mainstream US media.

[Starlight]

Mainstream US media.

Mainstream US media has a lot of problems. One of those problems IMO is that they are one of the biggest bunch of warmongers in history.

Noam Chomsky wrote in 1988 Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media showing how US media had served as massive warmongers for the US's various wars... only to be subsequently demonstrated to be right by the biggest Lie-Based War of them all: The 2003 Iraq War. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the US MSM beat the drums of war in an almost unprecedented way and acted as stenographers for the government, mindlessly repeating every lie the government told as if it were truth, and treated dissenters as crazy and unpatriotic. Chomsky's general thesis was that large corporate-owned for-profit media companies actually tend to end up giving more favorable coverage to the government than state-owned media typically does, because of how they compete for access and how their incentive structures work. (Whereas state-owned media companies, e.g. the BBC, are not by nature necessarily as propagandist).

If the US MSM was truly running anti-war articles I would fall out of my chair in shock. I am in no way surprised, however, to see Breitbart making up false stories, as per usual, making false claims about what the MSM is supposedly doing. In this case, it's particularly funny, because Breitbart accused the MSM of being anti-war as if progressive anti-war positions would be allowed to be aired in any serious way on the US MSM! Perhaps the reason for the Breitbart writer's fantasy was that a lot of conservatives convinced themselves the US MSM are 'liberal' ( ), when the reality is that the US MSM are staunchly anti-progressive. Again, I'll remind people that when Bernie Sanders briefly pulled ahead of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary, the "liberal" Washington Post immediately ran 16 anti-Sanders stories in a 16 hour period (that's how much a 'liberal' US MSM source actually likes liberals. Whereas they were fine with neo-con warmonger, and friend and student of unexecuted war criminal Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton).

[Mountain Man]

There is a huge difference between being "gently critical" and doing what Breitbart said they did. Breitbart made this claim...

No, there is not a huge difference. You obviously went through the articles to find the very few that offered a few sentences of very mild criticism buried in an otherwise positive, even glowing portrayal of North Korea and its leaders (the majority of articles didn't even bother with that and just wrote puff pieces).

The New York Times, which you singled out, is a perfect example. The bulk of the article gushes about how charming Kim Yo-jong is without bothering to mention that she operates concentration camps (why would they leave out that little detail?) and is sharply critical of Vice President Pence and the US's diplomacy, then when they finally do get around to offering a mildly negative counter point, it's buried at the very bottom of the lengthy article and is presented merely as someone's opinion rather than as fact. You could read the entire article, including the mild criticism at the end, and still come away with a largely positive impression of North Korea and its leaders.

[Sparko]

Laughing at Psychic Missile's and Charles' resultant Kabuki dance when their hypocrisy is pointed out to them.