When Reportage Is Propaganda: Bret Stephens
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB11670627175020993366304581063890256830606
Journalism from places like North Korea and Iran should be prefaced with a disclaimer: Big Brother Is Reading This, Too.
The New York Times recently featured a photo and video essay by the celebrated photojournalist David Guttenfelder titled “Illuminating North Korea.” It’s a potent reminder that nothing is so blinding as the illusion of seeing.
I don’t mean to disparage Mr. Guttenfelder’s photographic skills or his sincerity. But what are we to make of a photo essay heavy on pictures of modern-looking factories and well-fed children being fussed over in a physical rehabilitation center? Or—from his Instagram account (“Everyday DPRK”)—of theme-park water slides, Christian church interiors, well-stocked clothing stores and rollerblading Pyongyang teens—all suggesting an ordinariness to North Korean life that, as we know from so many sources, is a travesty of the terrifying truth?
I’ve been thinking about Mr. Guttenfelder’s photos, and of the prominence the Times gave them, while considering the trade-offs between access and propaganda. In April 2003, Eason Jordan, then CNN’s news chief, wrote a revealing op-ed in the Times about his network’s coverage of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
“Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN’s Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders,” Mr. Jordan wrote. “Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard—awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.”
It was an appalling confession of a massive journalistic whitewash, all for the sake of scoring prime time with tyrants. But sometimes it takes a great fool to reveal an important truth. In this case, the truth that much of what passes for news reporting from closed societies is, if not worthless, compromised to the point that it should be prefaced with an editorial disclaimer: Big Brother Is Reading This, Too.
Take a more current case: Jason Rezaian, the California-born Washington Post reporter in Tehran, who was imprisoned last year by the regime and is now facing espionage charges. Mr. Rezaian’s mistreatment is characteristic of a regime that has made a habit of jailing American journalists, including the Journal’s Jerry Seib in 1987. That should be enough to warn Western news organizations not to post people for long stints in Iran.
But the Post apparently thought it could play it safe, and last December Post reporters Joby Warrick and Carol Morello explained why. “Although other journalists have been arrested in Iran, Rezaian did not expect that he would be targeted, said his mother,” the Post noted.
“Rezaian had taken great care not to touch any of the tripwires that had gotten other journalists in trouble with Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the agency that grants credentials to foreign journalists. ‘He knew about the high-profile cases where people had broken the rules,’ she said. ‘He followed the rules.’ ”
Tripwires? Rules? I could be mistaken, but I don’t think I’ve seen the Post spell out what those rules are, so that readers can judge for themselves whether reports datelined Tehran are censored, self-censored, or genuinely comprehensive and unfiltered.
Even more acute has been the generally hidden censorship of reporters covering the Palestinians. During last year’s war in Gaza, the Foreign Press Association in Israel issued a statement denouncing “the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting international journalists in Gaza.”
The statement was all the more impressive given that self-censorship has long been the norm for Western reporters covering the Palestinians, when it’s not outright fellow traveling. But aside from these rare moments of candor, readers rarely appreciate that their understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fundamentally skewed by the fact that news from Israel is reported freely and fiercely, while news from the Palestinian territories comes filtered through lenses of ideology and fear.
Which brings me back to North Korea. I wrote Mr. Guttenfelder to ask him about his work in the country, including whether he had ever encountered evidence of malnutrition or human-rights abuses. He did not answer directly but referred me to previous interviews, which emphasize that his work is “uncensored.” That’s quite a claim, given that he admits that he “travels with a guide,” and “I don’t interview people privately.”
Sorry to break it to Mr. Guttenfelder, but a pretense of openness is the way by which totalitarian regimes have always enlisted useful idiots into doing their bidding. One in four North Korean children suffer from chronic malnutrition. The regime holds some 200,000 political prisoners in its gulag, in which, according to a U.N. inquiry, “the inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labour, executions, torture, rape.”
Needless to say, none of this crosses Mr. Guttenfelder’s lens. In making the regime seem almost normal, he invites us to forget what it is. Whatever that is, it isn’t journalism.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com.
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