Since I don’t think these men are stupid or incompetent,
there are two ways to explain this: (1) as the Pulitzer-winning NYT reporter John Burns explained, journalists who want “exclusive” access have a powerful temptation to pitch softball questions; or (2) outright intimidation of journalists who get too inquisitive. This happened to another ABC reporter who visited Pyongyang with the Korean Friendship Assocation several years ago. In his case, they seized all his tapes, busted his equipment, put him under room-arrest, and put him through an interrogation session.

ABC’s report wasn’t completely devoid of interesting content, but I wish they were half as skeptical of the North Koreans as they are at Pentagon news conferences.

Some transcriber at ABC made an honest mistake in writing that, but was wrong to not fact-check it. But I will say it can be confusing. There are a lot of places where the last-given name order is reversed to “Western” style of given-last. The Japanese do this A LOT in Western contexts.

And then, dividing up the given name into two separate syllables as if they are two separate names is another part of the problem. Kim Gye Gwan. Are we to believe people called him Gye? No, his name is Gyegwan (and I suspect it should be spelled Kyegwan).

Even the misguided NAKL calls for people to close up the gap in the given names, dividing them only by an optional hyphen and only when it’s necessary to distinguish between two possible interpretations: Ha-eon versus Hae-on, for example (which are nonsense names, by the way).

I had to go back and delete some of the cuss words I liberally put into the orignial post.

I’ll leave it at that here, because I can’t go back and edit comments I make here……..

ABC Sucks

http://www.koreasojourner.blog....._water.htm