Pretending to know about North Korea
[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#dcdcdc; padding-bottom:5px; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom:none; border-radius:0.4615em 0.4615em 0em 0em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]Pretending to know about North Korea
Want to know what's going on in the Korean peninsula? So does the entire American press[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#f0f0f0; border:1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top:none; border-radius:0em 0em 0.4615em 0.4615em; box-shadow:3px 3px 3px #999999;"]Here’s what I know about North Korea: Their tween dictator keeps saying he might have to nuke everyone if they don’t stop bugging him and no one agrees on whether or not he has the ability to nuke anyone. The Defense Intelligence Agency says North Korea has “low reliability” missiles that could could carry nuclear warheads. But that is not the consensus view of the intelligence community, according to other sources. Officially, the U.S. does not believe that North Korea could launch a nuclear armed missile. But, you never know! Seriously, you never know, because no one knows what North Korea is thinking and what they are capable of. That lack of knowledge does not stop our intrepid news-content creators, though!
This is the sort of story that our newsmedia is absolutely awful at covering. Most people on cable news are brainless idiots hired primarily for their ability to talk on camera for long periods of time without saying “uh” that often, and even when they have a simplistic-but-workable grasp of domestic affairs they rarely know shit about the rest of the world. North Korea is a secretive hermit state that even the CIA can’t penetrate, and every report on the capabilities and motivations of the primary actors there will by necessity involve a lot of guesswork.
Making matters worse is that our political press frequently moonlights as our foreign affairs press. And that press thrives on partisan conflict and has an innate bias in favor of “action.” (Every Sunday show features a foreign policy panel in which multiple participants inevitably agree that America needs to “do something” about the situation in some other country. “Do something” is always considered sound, serious advice.)
Honest reporters usually acknowledge that no one knows anything. I mean, maybe John Kerry and Chuck Hagel know something, but I bet even they are operating based on a lot of educated guessing right now. But do you know who certainly don’t know shit about North Korea? Pundits. The great Jack Shafer already described the various cliches beat reporters have to cycle through when covering North Korea. “Pyongyang reliably remains defiant; talks have resumed or been proposed, canceled, or stalled, while a U.S. envoy seeks to lure the North back to those talks to restart the dialog….” While actual reporters have to put in effort to explain, again, as always, that they don’t know shit, pundits, who know less than shit, can just freely pretend to have very well-thought-out opinions about what we must do.
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/12/no_one_knows_anything_about_north_korea/
