I agree very much with what you say, and please don’t misunderstand my post as a defence of North Korea. I know nothing about the country, and very little that I have read comes from a source that I’d consider impartial enough to trust. However your statement doesn’t quite address my point, which is that it’s easy to misrepresent someone if they’re speaking a less-widely known language. Iranians know the score. It is of course North Korea’s weakness, to a great extent. Part of the problem of running an obviously tightly-controlled state media machine for propaganda purposes is that it becomes easy for other countries to propagandise about you, too, since your own sources are obviously tainted. However the looney-tunes pattern of news coverage we see is too idiotic to be credible, and this arouses my suspicions - since the people we are talking about are smart enough to end up governing a country and defying the will of the most powerful nations on the planet - it doesn’t seem plausible that they’d be stupid enough to think we’d believe their stories about world-record rounds of golf or discovering unicorn lairs - nor does it seem likely that they’d actually give that much of a shit about hairstyles.
