Speaking in Japan a couple of days before the Pyeongchang Olympics began, Vice President Mike Pence delivered a welcome message: “We will not allow North Korean propaganda to hijack the message and imagery of the Olympic Games,” he said. Unfortunately, Pence was not doing double duty as an assignment editor at CNN or the Washington Post.
In the first few days of the competition, the Pyeongchang Olympics really did, in many ways, morph into the Pyongyang Olympics. “Hijack” is precisely the word for what happened. These Olympics should have been a celebration of South Korea’s titanic achievements since the Korean War. The country was utterly devastated in that brutal conflict yet in subsequent decades went on to become one of the world’s technological, economic, and cultural powerhouses. It peacefully transitioned from military dictatorship to democracy, giving the lie to the Beijing-propagated notion that societies with roots in Confucianism are somehow unsuited to democracy.
That story went largely untold, though, because of North Korea’s decision to send cheerleaders, field a joint women’s hockey team with the South, and dispatch two top officials to the games: the nominal head of state of the non-democratic, non-republican, and anti-people Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, 90-year-old Kim Yong-nam, and Kim Yo-jong, who heads up the propaganda apparatus of the regime. Both are sanctioned by the Treasury Department for their roles in the grotesque human rights abuses in their country. And Kim Yo-jong happens to be the younger sister of dictator Kim Jong-un. She is accused by many critics of being “complicit” in the North’s human rights abuses. But that’s actually a euphemism—Kim is an active agent and instigator of them.
North Korea’s decision to join the games was likely a sign of weakness and fear: Made nervous by the ever-strengthening sanctions and the isolation of the country, the decidedly abnormal regime in Pyongyang wanted to appear normal to the outside world; to bolster its “brand,” in market-speak. Many in the U.S. media were all too happy to help.
CNN led the way. In the opening days of the games, the television network declared that Kim Yo-jong was “stealing the show at the Winter Olympics.” In an article that did not once mention the atrocities that Kim is accused of propagating (and that, in a failure of basic journalism, did not even mention that she is sanctioned by the United States), CNN journalists wrote, “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.” Kim’s “warm message,” by the way, was anything but: She called for “unification” of the Korean peninsula, which in the terms of her regime means taking over the South. Apparently the three CNN reporters whose bylines appeared over the article—none of whom have any expertise in Korea—were unable to decode the fairly blatant message.
A Washington Post article called the dictator’s sister the “Ivanka Trump” of North Korea. Yahoo News gushed over “North Korea’s political princess.” Another, truly perverse, CNN article, citing a “senior diplomatic source close to North Korea,” accused Mike Pence of having missed an “opportunity” at the games. “The senior diplomatic source said Pence ‘degraded the image of the United States as a superpower’ by meeting with North Korean defectors along with Otto Warmbier’s father, and by speaking strongly against North Korea on multiple occasions,” CNN said. Otto Warmbier was the American college student who died six days after being repatriated in a coma from North Korea, where U.S. officials believe he was beaten during more than a year of unjust imprisonment.
On one level, all this fawning over North Korea’s charnel house regime can be chalked up to nothing so much as the parochialism of journalists who wrongly imagine themselves to be cosmopolitan: Hardly conversant in the intricacies of Korean history, reporters airlifted into Pyeongchang (or at home watching on television) grafted their own partisan rooting interests onto an extraordinarily delicate and complicated situation. Kim was mean to Pence; therefore Kim is part of the Resistance! The “Ivanka Trump” line is telling in this regard. Metaphors can be useful, yes—but they can also reveal a poverty of understanding. The North Korean regime knows no parallel anywhere on Earth. Likening Kim to Ivanka obscures that fact.
The swooning came in for criticism, largely on Twitter, and spurred equally heated defenses. A New York Times blogger, Max Fisher, accused those who denounced the media’s flattery of Kim Yo-jong of engaging in “virtue-signaling.” As if it were inconceivable that one could sincerely be upset by the glorification of a regime that’s killed millions.
Other defenders of the swooning took a more sophisticated tack. They said the media were simply relaying facts: that North Korea’s “charm offensive” had worked. This was the line that Washington Post blogger Daniel Drezner took. But the media were enthusiastic partners in the charm offensive, not refereeing it from the sidelines. When CNN presents Kim Yo-jong as a glamorous political figure, it doesn’t just reflect reality; it creates it.
While the U.S. media were taken in by the North’s propaganda, the South Korean media and public decidedly were not. South Korea’s still highly influential leading dailies flayed President Moon Jae-in for his apparent acquiescence in this charade. Moon’s approval rating fell by around 10 points when the decision to field a joint hockey team was announced. Two-thirds of South Koreans polled, meanwhile, said they didn’t believe that the North’s charm offensive meant that the regime’s attitude had changed; fully 90 percent expected the nuclear program to remain. Indeed, a mere 6 percent professed to believe that the North would give up its arsenal. Even a memorandum of understanding put out by the South’s ministry of unification admitted, “Although many Koreans are welcoming North Korea’s participation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, there are also significant criticism and concerns both domestically and internationally.”
As usual, the people we did not hear from were the North Koreans, trapped and silenced by the thuggish regime that controls them—just as the fabulous and glamorous Kim Yo-jong wants them to be.
Ethan Epstein is associate editor of The Weekly Standard.
