How Media Failures Complicate The Nuclear Talks With North Korea

moon of alabama

North Korea recently again asked the Trump administration to stick to the three steps agreed upon in the Singapore Statement.

The Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin characterizes the North Korean request as "belligerent":

Pompeo received the letter from Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party Central Committee, on Friday morning, and showed it to Trump in the White House, two senior administration officials confirmed. The exact contents of the message are unclear, but it was sufficiently belligerent that Trump and Pompeo decided to call off Pompeo’s journey ...

Reuters amplified the alleged "belligerence" when it headlined:

Trump called off Pompeo's North Korea visit after belligerent letter: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump called off a visit to North Korea by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after the latter received a belligerent letter from a senior North Korean official just hours after the trip was announced last week, the Washington Post reportedon Monday.

Reuters must know that Josh Rogin does not do "reporting". He is not a journalist but a neocon shill with a direct line to John Bolton. He publishes his effusions in the Opinion section of the paper, not in its news parts.

CNN then entered the frail and reported the real content of the letter:

North Korea warns Pompeo denuclearization talks are 'at stake,' sources say:

Top North Korean officials warned the United States in a letter that denuclearization talks are "again at stake and may fall apart," sources familiar with the process told CNN.The letter was delivered to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whose fourth trip to Pyongyang was abruptly canceled, hours before he was scheduled to depart with his new special envoy Stephen Biegun on Friday, sources said.
Three sources with direct knowledge of the North Korean position on denuclearization said the letter stated that Kim's regime felt that the process couldn't move forward because "the US is still not ready to meet (North Korean) expectations in terms of taking a step forward to sign a peace treaty."

The described demand by North Korea to follow the agreed upon steps is certainly not 'belligerent'.

After the CNN reported the real content of the letter Reuters changed its 'belligerent' headline to:

North Korea tells U.S. denuclearisation talks may fall apart - CNN

but the URL to the piece on the Reuters website still reflects the original headline:

https://in.reuters.com/article/northkorea-usa/trump-called-off-pompeos-north-korea-visit-after-belligerent-letter-report-idINKCN1LC2HA.

 The text though is now heavily modified:

WASHINGTON/SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean officials have warned in a letter to the United States that denuclearisation talks were “again at stake and may fall apart”, CNN reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
...
The Washington Post reported on Monday that U.S. President Donald Trump called off a visit to North Korea by Pompeo after the latter received a belligerent letter from a senior North Korean official just hours after the trip was announced last week.

The "belligerent" Washington Post nonsense was moved down from the headline and first graph to the seventh of nine paragraphs. It should have been deleted or further modified.

This incident demonstrates two problems:

• News agencies like Associated Press, Reuters, AFP or DPA have increased their distribution of opinions and vague reports picked from other media without confirming the content themselves. Reuters first picked the item from an Opinion piece in the Washington Post and then corrected it with the bits it gleaned from a CNN piece. Where are its own reporters? Has Reuters given up on those? This is an abrogation of the original task and purpose of a general news agency.
• Websites which more or less automatically re-publish news agency reports do not have an automatic update process which replaces  news-agency report with updates or corrections should the agency release any. A search for the "belligerent" Reuters headline finds more than 30 such entries hours after the original was updated and the headline changed. The lack of an automatic update procedure for agency news leaves a large amount of 'official' fakenews alive on the web even when the original piece has been retracted or modified.

Back to the North Korea issue. It is obvious that the Trump administration is not willing to follow the agreed upon sequence in the Singapore Statement and Panmunjom Declaration. 

It wants to proceed with step three, an aspirational North Korean promise to "work towards" denuclearization, before taking step one and two which prescribe the move towards better relations and a peace treaty. Instead of criticizing the unwillingness of the Trump administration to stick to its commitment, U.S. media push the administration further down its belligerent path.

A Washington Post editorial today laments that the Singapore negotiations have given North Korea too much. It urges Trump further into the blind alley he already finds himself in:

The administration’s best hope of rescuing the situation is to return to talking with North Korea about an equitable tradeoff. To start the process of denuclearization, U.S. officials say the Kim regime must provide a complete inventory of its assets — warheads, production facilities and other nuclear infrastructure — and agree to inspections to verify it. Previous negotiations have broken down because of Pyongyang’s refusal to take this step, so a full disclosure would provide the first clear signal that Mr. Kim was serious about denuclearization. That, along with a freeze in the production of missiles and fissile materials, could justify U.S. participation in the end-of-conflict declaration the two Koreas are seeking.

This is exactly what Trump and his water carrier Pompeo are doing. They demand that North Korea bows to whatever the U.S. wishes without assuring it of a significant quid pro quo. If the U.S. can not even stick to simple agreements, like the Singapore Statement, why should North Korea believe any verbal assurance of vague steps the U.S. might take after it disarms?

The only way out of this is for the U.S. to offer and sign a peace treaty that finally brings the Korea War to an official end. There is only one alternatives to that. A return U.S. strategic maneuvers, which Defense Secretary Mattis just now announced, followed up by North Korea with new nuclear and missile tests, possibly combined in a launch towards Guam. The 2020 commission report explains what we can expect to followed from these steps.

Posted by b on August 28, 2018 at 11:53 AM | Permalink

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