New York Times Falls For That Fake North Korea Twitter Account
Matt Novak
Today 1:09pm
North Korea launched its first ICBM yesterday, putting the world on the brink of nuclear war. But in the rush to get news printed, some journalists were a bit sloppy. The New York Times mistook a tweet from the North Korea parody account DPRK_News as real. And this isn’t the first time news outlets have been suckered by “news” from this Twitter account.
The New York Times story was first published on Tuesday and updated to include this:
On Wednesday morning, [Kim Jong-un] taunted the United States, saying the launch was a Fourth of July “gift” to the Trump administration.
“We should send them gifts once in a while to help break their boredom,” he said, according to the North Korean state-run news agency. On Twitter early Wednesday, the North Korean government belittled the joint exercise as “demonstrating near total ignorance of ballistic science.”
The reporters apparently saw this tweet from the parody account, which shows a GIF of US and South Korean missile tests at an undisclosed location in South Korea, not unlike the ones that happened earlier today.
Imbecilic Americans drunkenly fire missiles into East Sea of Korea, demonstrating near total ignorance of ballistic science.
The New York Times had to issue a correction:
Correction: July 4, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article attributed incorrectly a Twitter statement to the North Korean government. The North Korean government did not belittle a joint American-South Korean military exercise as “demonstrating near total ignorance of ballistic science,” that statement was from the DPRK News Service, a parody Twitter account.
The account has been run for years by two anonymous authors associated with attorney Ken White, known online as Popehat. Gizmodo even reported on it being fake in January of 2015 in a post that got this blogger blocked from following the account.
There was this comment:
DaddyRoundRound > Matt Novak
7/05/17 1:36pm
Best Kim Jong-Un parody account is definitely @KimJongNumberUn
Umm, no. DPRK_News is off the scale.
= new reply since forum marked as read
