美国国家公共电台 NPR What Summit? On North Korean TV, The News Is All About Rice Farming

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The proposed summit between the U.S. and North Korea is dominating headlines around the world - except in one place, North Korea itself. Our Seoul correspondent Elise Hu has a look at what North Koreans are learning in advance of the Singapore summit.

ELISE HU, BYLINE¹: The summit was off. Now it's likely back on. And the talk about it plays on every channel in America.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: President Trump² has spent weeks hyping his upcoming summit with North Korea.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: ...For months and months, and yet the summit was organized and was going to happen. Was the president...

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: We've seen the president so eager for this meeting to happen.

HU: But what's dominating the news in North Korea?

CHAD O'CARROLL: North Korean TV news, the last few days, has mainly being about rice planting season. So it's a huge, huge difference.

HU: Chad O'Carroll monitors North Korean state media for his service nknews.org.

O'CARROLL: Seriously.

HU: What about rice planting season, I asked.

O'CARROLL: Well, now's the time. And they're showing, I guess, the farmers are at work.

HU: This leaves North Koreans largely in the dark about all the rushed diplomacy³ happening in the lead up to June 12. That's the scheduled date for a Trump-Kim summit. While a North Korean envoy⁴ met this week with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in New York, North Koreans saw none of that in their regular 5 and 8 pm national broadcasts. Martyn Williams knows. He records and watches state television every day. And state television is the only TV news North Koreans get.

MARTYN WILLIAMS: You can keep 25 million people completely in the dark. So the sort of propaganda apparatus⁵ and the way that the North Korean government tells different things to its people - and also restricts them from hearing things - is one of the things I was most interested in.

HU: Williams says when Kim met with South Korean leader Moon Jae-In in April, the world watched live while North Koreans did not.

WILLIAMS: It was kind of amazing that we were watching all that live, and they had absolutely no access to any of it. But, of course, that changed after the summit.

HU: A few days after that summit and meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, state TV put together a half-hour documentary that place highlights they deem acceptable for the populace. This kind of information control, Williams says, gives the regime flexibility⁶ in case things don't work out.

WILLIAMS: There's a big risk for the North Koreans in kind of telegraphing too much to their own people ahead of time. So what they do is they wait until afterwards.

HU: North Koreans do know that a summit with the U.S. leader is coming up. But that's about it.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: (Speaking Korean).

HU: This is a North Korean state TV reference to the June 12 date and thanking South Korea for its effort in making things happen. Chad O'Carroll says the lack of coverage⁷ is normal in North Korea. But what has changed in North Korean news lately is its tone toward its traditional enemy the U.S.

O'CARROLL: The rhetoric⁸ was very angry, very anti-America. And that almost disappeared after Trump accepted that proposal for the summit.

HU: O'Carroll says the softer tone toward America is seen not just online, in newspapers and on television but even on the citizen-to-citizen propaganda level. He's talking about leaflets that are often dropped over or blown into the southern side of the border.

O'CARROLL: They used to find these things with cartoon depictions of Donald Trump being stamped on the side of a curb⁹, blood everywhere, or him having his toes sucked by the South Korean president - really pretty crude stuff.

HU: But that anti-American propaganda has now taken a more peaceful tone.

O'CARROLL: Some of them you would even have thought may have come from South Korea, like cartoon designs showing the Olympic mascots¹⁰.

HU: Those are from the February Winter Games in which the two Koreas fielded their first ever joint¹¹ team. If this kind of North Korean propaganda is any guide, signs of peace are appearing. Elise Hu, NPR News, Seoul.

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