As the New York Times found out to its chagrin two years ago:
NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS
The Men Behind the Infamous Fake North Korean Twitter Account
The DPRK News Service is not actually the DPRK’s news service—but it’s the closest peek behind the curtain we may get.
Justin Rohrlich
Updated 07.10.17 12:21AM ET / Published 07.10.17 1:00AM ET
After North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile on the Fourth of July, the Korean Central News Agency released a statement from Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. ... “We should send them gifts once in a while to help break their boredom,” Kim declared, referring, obviously, to the United States. Kim then described the the Hwasong-14 missile, which analysts believe has the potential to reach Alaska, as “handsome as a good-looking boy.”
Tuesday’s ICBM launch was the “final step” toward North Korea’s goal of being a “confident and powerful nuclear state that can strike anywhere on Earth,” declared the country’s Academy of Defence Science. ... At 7:36 Tuesday evening (1:06 Wednesday morning in North Korea, accounting for its unique GMT+08:30 time zone), the DPRK News Service took to social media, posting a GIF of an undated joint U.S.-South Korean missile test denouncing the Americans as rank imbeciles.
“On Twitter early Wednesday, the North Korean government belittled the joint exercise as ‘demonstrating near total ignorance of ballistic science,’”
The New York Times reported on its website a short time later.
Imbecilic Americans drunkenly fire missiles into East Sea of Korea, demonstrating near total ignorance of ballistic science.
The problem was, the North Korean government tweeted nothing of the sort. As numerous other outlets have learned the hard way, the DPRK News Service is not actually the DPRK’s news service.
The line was removed from the article about 45 minutes later, and a correction followed roughly an hour after that:
“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.”
....
I believed it at first too. The language is just what I heard on North Korean shortwave broadcasts years ago. I put something in LBN based on a DPRK_News tweet a few years back.
Imbecilic Americans drunkenly fire missiles into East Sea of Korea, demonstrating near total ignorance of ballistic science.
You got into @nytimes again @Popehat
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