The US mainstream media has been chillingly silent regarding the escalating tensions between North Korea and South Korea. That has begun to change now that it has been confirmed that a torpedo from a North Korean military ship is what caused the sinking of a South Korean military ship. Unfortunately, our media cannot be trusted to present the facts in an honest fashion when reporting on such subjects.
Here is one example that I stumbled across on Saturday afternoon. The headline from The Drudge Report, a so called conservative news source, reads NKOREAN LEADER AUTHORIZED ATTACK ON SOUTH:
When I clicked on the link it brought me to The New York Times, a so called liberal news source. The article in question is titled U.S. Implicates North Korean Leader in Attack. This does not sound quite as damning as The Drudge Report headline but it sounds quite conclusive, no? Let's keep in mind that publications like the Times usually have an editor write the headlines and not the actual author of the article. Now let's read what the article actually states:
A new American intelligence analysis of a deadly torpedo attack on a South Korean warship concludes that Kim Jong-il, the ailing leader of North Korea, must have authorized the torpedo assault, according to senior American officials who cautioned that the assessment was based on their sense of the political dynamics there rather than hard evidence.
“We can’t say it is established fact,” said one senior American official who was involved in the highly classified assessment, based on information collected by many of the country’s 16 intelligence agencies. “But there is very little doubt, based on what we know about the current state of the North Korean leadership and the military.”
So an unnamed American intelligence official believes that the North Korean leader must have called for the attack simply because of his vast understanding of the North Korean leadership. I have no idea if this unnamed official is right or wrong but what he is stating is clearly different from the Times headline and even more different than what Drudge went with. This type of reporting, by both major political leanings in this case, needs to stop. The Korean situation is very serious and deserves to be reported in a serious manner.
