The Western Press Revolts in North Korea

The BBC’s observations about North Korea were hardly original—Wingfield-Hayes is not the first journalist to note that the leader is fat—but they were made on camera, inside the country, at a most sensitive time. North Korea was hosting a delegation of a hundred and thirty journalists for the Workers’ Party Congress, which was to elevate Kim Jong-un to Party chairman. Kim, who is in his early thirties and took over after his father’s death, in 2011, already had too many titles to fit onto a business card, so the event was more spectacle than substance. The Party wanted to show that Kim Jong-un, dressed for the occasion in a banker’s pin-striped suit and eyeglasses, was a modern professional leader and that North Korea wasn’t the same old hermit kingdom. The foreign journalists were supposed to be part of the show, the modern equivalent of a Greek chorus extolling the merits of the new leader.