CIA-funded anti-DPRK disinfo outlets: Unification Media Group and its propaganda arm The Daily NK

One of the most commonly sourced anti-DPRK disinfo dumps for Western media clerks is The Daily NK, which is the propaganda arm of Seoul-based Unification Media Group.

Unification Media Group has for years received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, and that relationship was reaffirmed in June 2018.



National Endowment for Democracy is a CIA propaganda/money-laundering front.



Fabrications and lies compose the vast majority of what The Daily NK publishes. This becomes clear when one sees how The Daily NK deals with inconsistencies that pop up in its own propaganda.



In November 2015, The Daily NK published a supposed “interview” with Shin Mi-nyo, who works in RoK as a professional anti-DPRK propagandist. In the interview as published in 2015, Shin supposedly says that in the Kim Jong Un era, “If you defect, your entire family (your mother’s side, your father’s side, your spouse’s side) would all be exiled [to remote regions of DPRK]. This policy was created to completely stop anyone from leaving. Regulations have become quite strict in this respect.”



However, in June 2017, The Daily NK published an article that claimed to depict the life of a 20-year-old woman living in DPRK’s Hyesan city. The woman’s mother was widely known to have defected to RoK, yet the daughter wasn’t exiled and was allowed to continue living in a city. Obviously, this contradicts Shin Mi-nyo’s claims about DPRK’s exiling defectors’ “entire families” to remote regions of DPRK.



When this contradiction was pointed out to The Daily NK, they simply changed the transcript from Shin Mi-nyo’s interview to match the most recent vintage of propaganda that they were publishing. The interview with Shin Mi-nyo now reads: “If you defect, your entire family would be subject to extreme surveillance and routinely forced to pay bribes to evade further punishment or exile. This policy was created to completely stop anyone from leaving. Regulations have become quite strict in this respect.”



The Daily NK seemed quite happy to obligingly alter their propaganda. Because they so rarely receive criticism from imperial media stenographers, The Daily NK may have assumed that the Twitter user who pointed out the contradiction was just trying to help them.