This column by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal has got my blood boiling. His main point is that people who report from authoritarian places like North Korea and Iran are being “useful idiots” – really, he used that term – by going into places where the governing regime puts controls on journalists. He takes particular aim at David Guttenfelder, the former AP photographer who has contributed immensely to our understanding of what’s going on in North Korea.



Now, I’ve never met or even emailed with Guttenfelder so I have no allegiance to him, and, to be honest, I was kind of underwhelmed by the photos he produced from his recent assignment in North Korea for the New York Times. There were too many pictures of Pyongyang and the showcase places that foreigners are taken to – the DMZ, the maternity hospital, concerts put on by heavily made-up children who’ve been turned into automatons. But much of Guttenfelder’s other photojournalism from North Korea has been genuinely illuminating – like these pictures he took during an astonishing road trip through the countryside (yes, with a guide, but he still got to capture places that very few foreigners have seen and definitely count as off the beaten track.)



Stephens basically says that if we can’t report from the gulags without a guide, then we shouldn’t be reporting from North Korea at all. Or, by that logic, from Iran or Syria or Gaddafi’s Libya or probably present day China or Myanmar. Certainly not from the Soviet Union before the Iron Curtain came down. This seems to me to be entirely wrongheaded.



Also wrongheaded: conflating North Korea with Iran.



First, some background. Between 2004 and 2008, I was the Financial Times’ Korea correspondent and during that time I made five trips to Pyongyang and six others to the southern border regions of Kaesong and Kumgangsan. Then, I got the job of Iran correspondent and was in and out Tehran for two years. Unfortunately this was during the Ahmadi-nejad crackdown on the foreign press and I never got a residence permit, but I did make repeated trips to Iran, once for three months, and I had an apartment and a car and a social life there. I also made five or so reporting trips to Syria, where I was closely watched, one to Libya during the Gaddafi era, where I had a government-appointed minder, and another to Hamas-controlled Gaza. After I started working for The Washington Post in Asia a year ago, I returned to Pyongyang for a wrestling tournament (really).



In Iran, I could work relatively freely. I could go down to the bazaar and interview merchants or to a drug rehab center and talk to addicts. I went to polling booths and interviewed voters, I attended press conferences where I made chit-chat with Ahmadi-nejad afterwards (“of course I will give you an interview”). During the disputed 2009 election, my friend Farnaz Fassihi wrote some amazing dispatches – for the Wall Street Journal, no less – from the streets. None of this is to say that Iran has a free press or is an easy place to work – the egregious treatment of my colleague Jason Rezaian is proof of that – but Iran is not North Korea.



In North Korea, journalists must be accompanied by a guide at all times. The schedule always heavy on Kim-worship – I’ve been to Kim Il Sung’s birthplace six times, and have yet to discover any news there – and there are few options for dictating your own itinerary. But having said that, I’ve requested to interview an economics professor and it was granted, and I requested to visit a factory where operations had been devolved to the manager and it was also granted.



Do I think I had frank and truthful conversations with those people? Of course not. They would be risking their lives to deviate from the regime’s line, and I always assumed I was being given the regime line, and made this clear in my reporting.



But you know what? Some information is always better than no information. You know what I learned when I went to see that economics professor at Kim Il Sung University? That there was almost no electricity in this most prestigious educational institution in the country. A staff member turned on the elevator so I didn’t have to walk up 20 flights of stairs (pity the students who receive no such VIP treatment). You know what I learned when I went to the Red Cross hospital in Pyongyang, the best medical facility in the country, one February? Again, very little electricity. I was inside in my Goretex coat, shivering, while patients sat in their beds in thin pajamas. If this is the best hospital, what’s it like out in the boonies? I set about to find out afterwards.



My point is that whenever we journalists go to these places we invariably come back with some snippet of information that can enhance our understanding about these countries and the lives of the people there.



We should absolutely be transparent about the restrictions placed upon us. Guttenfelder in his most recent work for the New York Times was up front about having a minder at all times (I loved his line about turning around 180 degrees and snapping what was in the other direction. It doesn’t take much to literally turn things around). And I was up front about the frustrations of reporting in North Korea when I wrote this post during a trip to Pyongyang last August.



But even with the minders and the bugs and god knows what else, not even North Korea can control everything. Like when our bus got a flat tire and we got to stand on the side of the road – unscheduled! – and watch everyday people walk by. Okay, so that’s not Pulitzer winning stuff, but watching ordinary North Koreans walk past on their way to work or school is much more illuminating than not seeing them at all. We know so little about North Korea that every new snippet helps our understanding.



Should our reporting on North Korea be based entirely on guided trips around the monuments of Pyongyang? Of course not. North Korea is a jigsaw puzzle and putting it together requires talking to North Korean refugees, analysts who pay close attention to North Korea, propaganda experts who sift through KCNA, other foreigners who get to travel more freely than journalists do, especially aid workers. The Chinese border with North Korea is a treasure trove of information about the real North Korea. Visiting the Potemkin North Korea can add another piece to the puzzle and maybe help us figure some things out.



My last trip to North Korea – the first in almost seven years – was illuminating to me because so much had changed. The city actually looked pretty good. One of the guides joked as the reflection of new apartment towers glittered in the river that Pyongyang now looked like Dubai. That was a gross exaggeration of course, but isn’t this the kind of information we want American policy makers, who can’t go there, to know? That Pyongyang is not on the ropes?

I wrote about this, about the relatively comfortable life that the elite of Pyongyang are now living. Does this mean that they’re less likely to rock the boat because they have so much more to lose? Or does it make it more likely that the have-nots will begin to agitate for more? We don’t know yet, but we do know that life in North Korea is changing a lot and we should be reporting about it.



That’s what I’m trying to do, from the outside and hopefully from the inside (but I won’t pull my punches just to try to get a visa).









