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The Pentagon put North Korea on top of the news agenda Thursday, when its spies reported their "moderate" confidence that North Korea had a "low reliability" nuclear-armed missile. Now the State Department follows up, making the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, again, the Story of the Day. All three newscasts kicked off from Seoul, where Secretary John Kerry asked Pyongyang not only to relinquish its nuclear weapons, but also to refrain from test-firing its rockets, even non-nuclear ones. Yet Kerry sent mixed signals: far from implying that the Defense Intelligence Agency had found anything threatening, he came up with this convoluted formulation, as quoted by ABC's Bob Woodruff: "It is inaccurate to suggest that the DPRK has fully tested, developed, or demonstrated capabilities that are articulated in that report." In other words -- State to Pentagon: You're Scaremongering.

Woodruff's report on ABC embodied Kerry's mixed messages. On the audio, we were reassured about nuclear weapons not miniaturized, rockets not launched, interceptors and radars not tested, hostilities not planned. On the video, we were bombarded by images of blastoffs and explosions. NBC, too, for the second straight day aired computer animation of Pyongyang's red-tipped rocket taking off, this time in Andrea Mitchell's report: presumably she had to rely on a graphic artist's imagination because the underlying event had not taken place. On CBS, we had Bob Orr telling us about the KN-08, Pyongyang's recently-unveiled intercontinental ballistic missile. Guess what? The KN-08 has not been tested either.

On NBC, Richard Engel continued his Pyongyangology. On Wednesday Engel's analysis was that North Korea's nuclear arsenal was indispensible because it turned the embattled state into a regional power; on Thursday, turning to the Musudan missile, Engel speculated that its test-launch would amount to a product demonstration for its arms industry's export marketing; now, he interprets Kim Jong Un's bellicose bluster as a negotiating tactic in order to secure economic aid for his impoverished people. "So far, the strategy is working. North Korea has captured the world's attention." Kim is not only a headliner on the network nightly newscasts, he is trending online too.
Andrew Tyndall 4/15/13 6:19:47 pm

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