“NOTHING can stop the South Korean people’s righteous fight to drive out the darkness of dictatorship and…usher in the dawn of a new democracy.” The phrase could almost be mistaken for the rallying cry of one of the millions of South Koreans who have joined weekly protests to unseat their democratically elected president, Park Geun-hye. But it actually appeared last month in North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of a dark dictatorship.

Since an influence-peddling scandal surrounding Ms Park erupted in October, the chance to jeer at her misfortune—North Korea routinely insults her as a “miserable political prostitute”—has been too good for its propagandists to pass up. They have published news and pictures of the demonstrations with impressive speed, and cheered Ms Park’s impeachment in December by South Korea’s National Assembly.

Public protests against the government of the South are “pure gold” for the North’s regime, says Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea, a group that works with defectors. Yet denigrating the South is not as easy as you might think. In its latest footage KCNA, the North’s official news agency, gleefully showed the serried ranks of protesters in Seoul, but blurred the city’s skyscrapers, presumably in an attempt to hide from the North’s downtrodden subjects the prosperity over the border.

But the government in the North no longer has a monopoly on information. More North Koreans are tuning in to foreign radio broadcasts, and South Korean dramas are smuggled into the country on USB drives. The prominent coverage of the South Korean protests in Rodong Sinmun, meanwhile, has inadvertently made them a sanctioned topic of discussion in the North, says DailyNK, a news outlet with informants there.

The protests against Ms Park have also stirred debate among many defectors living in the South. Lee Jeong Hyeok, who escaped from North Korea in 2002 as a teenager, has taken to the streets. It was his first real opportunity, he said, to act out the democracy that he had been taught in the South’s textbooks. His North Korean girlfriend took photographs to show her future children an event that was “unimaginable” when they were living in the North. Even those Northerners who know Rodong Sinmun is distorting the news, says Mr Lee, struggle to understand what is really happening.

Another North Korean defector who demonstrated in Seoul says that, while in the North, he had read about mass protests in South Korea out of curiosity, yet had never seen them as relevant to his situation. He had voted in North Korea (it holds sham elections) as well as in the South. But the recent protests, he said, had brought home to him that democracy must be fought for, too.