“You have a country that’s openly threatening to shoot missiles at American soil, and [news media outlets are] talking about its leaders as if they’re the Trudeaus,” said Michael Malice of recent praise that assorted news media outlets extended to Kim Yo-jong — the sister of North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un.
Malice, author of Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong II, offered his comments on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight in an interview with co-hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Ignorance of totalitarianism among news media figures contributes to an inability among some of them to accurately report on North Korea’s ruling family, said Malice. “You would think that the press would kind of be like, ‘Wait a minute, [North Korea] is our enemy. They’re against press freedom.’ But they have no concept in their privileged bubble what it’s like to live in a nation where there’s no press freedom. So they basically look at her like Angela Merkel or something.”
Totalitarianism in North Korea is “something that the press desperately does not understand,” said Malice.
Malice singled out CNN’s Jim Acosta as illustrative of a broader political ignorance across the news media. “The Western media in many senses is so privileged. Jim Acosta thinks President Trump kicking him out of the Oval Office is basically the equivalent of living in North Korea, that’s he’s oppressed and harmed.”
News media outlets praising Kim Yo-jong are giving a propaganda victory to the North Korean state “free of charge” by affirming narratives used to subjugate North Korea’s population, said Malice.
“[Kim Yo-jong] is in charge of [North Korea’s] propaganda and agitation department,” said Malice. “She’s in charge of making sure that everyone in the country is brainwashed from the crib to the grave. Since there’s no – by law – outside information allowed into North Korea, one of the things they tell the population is that the rest of the world is obsessed with North Korea; we’re all super interested in the great leader Kim Il-sung and his Juche idea, and we regard them with such esteem [as] they stand up to America; everyone admires them for it. … Now, she can say with a straight face, ‘Here’s the New York Times. Here’s the Wall Street Journal. Here’s CNN. They’re all telling you all eyes were on us. Everyone is obsessed with North Korea. Everyone cares about me,’ and she’ll be telling the truth. So when you are writing these headlines as a journalist, you have a responsibility to realize how this is going to be played overseas. This is the same exact reason Hillary Clinton in 2008 told Barack Obama she wouldn’t meet with Ahmadinejad without preconditions – and this is Hillary; this is not some moderate. She said, ‘Look, you meet with these people on their level. You have to think about how it’s going to play back home for them.’ That’s exactly what the press is doing free of charge.”
Mansour opined on the fetishization of communist regimes among news media figures, drawing on her own article on the subject, published Monday.
“I’m trying to figure out why exactly it’s like this, and I came up with three conclusions,” said Mansour. “The first, basically, is that the media just loves commies. This goes back to the New York Times and Walter Duranty, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara; anybody that’s a commie, they basically just love. The more anti-American the commie is – which most of them are – the better the media likes them. This guy, ‘Little Rocket Man,’ he’s basically an honorary member of ‘The Resistance.’ My other is that this is just all about getting an interview; the big get. Sort of like how CNN was basically sucking up to Saddam Hussein’s regime back during the first Gulf War, and they admitted it years later. My final theory is that they just hate Mike Pence so much, so they were like, ‘Hey, she’s got to be better than him.”
“The horrors that exist in North Korea, it’s impossible for us as a free people to imagine,” said Malice. “It’s totalitarianism, through and through, where every minute of your life is planned for you by the government.”
Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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