It is rare for the international media to be afforded such accessibility to the North Korean leader, and the summit Wednesday and Thursday drew as many as 3,000 journalists from around the world to Hanoi. On the first day of the two-day event, Kim made no comment, just cracked a smile and shook his head at a media onslaught so different from what he is used to at home. Trump told White House reporters, “Don’t raise your voice, please. This isn’t like yelling with Trump.”

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However, the following day, the authoritarian leader answered questions from White House reporters, including one from a Washington Post journalist, as his own press corps continued to hold back.

The quest to get any scrap of information from Kim or the North Korean negotiating team began even before they arrived in Hanoi — some South Korean journalists even flew drones over Kim’s heavily armored train as it made its 65-hour journey from Pyongyang.

Kim’s top bodyguards caught other reporters sneaking into his hotel and threatened them into deleting their photos and recordings.

If the North Korean state media team had anything on Kim, they weren’t about to share it with outside journalists.

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Their job, simply, is to follow the North Korean strongman “as if their life depended on it,” said Joo Seong-ha, who fled North Korea nearly two decades ago and writes about North Korean affairs for the South Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo.

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In 2017, a North Korean court sentenced two South Korean journalists to death in absentia over unflattering reports on the Kim regime.

Kim’s media machine has become part of the entourage as the young leader has embarked on an unprecedented diplomatic outreach mission to neighboring South Korea and the West.

After accompanying him last year on his first meeting with Trump in Singapore, the state-media pack arrived in Hanoi wearing the same red “press” bands on their arms, and the same loyalty badges, with portraits of North Korea’s late leaders, on their lapels.

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The men in black again burst onto the scene, pushing themselves through hectic Hanoi streets to get the best shot of Kim for the nation’s propaganda outlets. One cameraman stretched his body out the window of a moving car, a camera in one hand, to record footage of Kim.

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Photos of Kim’s first day in Vietnam were splashed across the front page of North Korea’s state-run Rodong Sinmun. The leader’s overseas activities were chronicled in detail for “all parts of the country missing him . . . boiling like a crucible” in anticipation of the historic summit, the newspaper reported.

Its staff probably worked through the night to get the big dispatch from Hanoi into the morning newspaper, said Joo, who is based in Seoul.

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Rodong Sinmun, the official mouthpiece of the ruling Worker’s Party of Korea, is put together with a “painstaking amount of discretion,” Joo added. Every aspect of the agitprop, from the vocabulary to the rhetoric, is carefully selected and checked by government officials at multiple levels.

Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader’s sister who serves as the director of the ruling party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, would have had the final eye in Hanoi before authorizing the report to be published, according to Joo.

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