Special thanks to Michael Madden of the US-Korea Institute at SAIS/38 North and North Korea Leadership Watch who contributed the research and writing for the appendices on the telecommunications bureaucracy and state security apparatus. [...] Precipitated by the collapse of the state economy during the famine of the 1990s, North Korea’s once strict external and internal controls on the flow of information atrophied as North Korean citizens traded with one another, and goods and people flowed across the border with China. [...] Freedom House ranks North Korea at the bottom of its Freedom of the Press index4 and Reporters Without Borders ranks it second to last ahead of only Eritrea.5 Given the state of the media, it is thus natural that, like other severe authoritarian contexts, North Koreans rely on human sources, mostly word-of-mouth, for much of the information they receive. [...] North Korean authorities perceive the influx of foreign content in digital form as an ideological threat, and the widespread use of digital media devices such as USB drives and SD cards to access illegal media has drawn the attention of North Korean security forces. [...] If North Korean efforts to reduce the influx of foreign media prove relatively successful, it will be important to monitor the degree to which North Korea is able to modernize domestic media content to fill the space created by censoring foreign media.
- Pages
- 102
- Published in
- Washington, D.C., United States of America
