Reticent North Korea wary of blowback as it watches South Korean political crisis

SEOUL, South Korea — The downfall of conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol might appear at first glance to offer North Korean state media czars a propaganda windfall.

After all, Mr. Yoon, before his shock declaration of martial law last month and his subsequent impeachment and detention, had adopted a hawkish stance toward North Korea and strengthened security links with the U.S. and Japan.

Now, a nation that North Koreans are conditioned to disparage as a “puppet” of the U.S. is wracked by political turmoil, marked by parliamentary drama, massive pro- and anti-Yoon demonstrations, and a violent courtroom invasion by his supporters.

South Korean press outlets are reporting these developments hour by hour.

North Korean media coverage, meanwhile, has been remarkably scant. Some say it reflects the dangers of the story for the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

“Basically, I think last week was the last time they reported,” Chung Sung-yeon, who watches North Korean state media for Seoul-based specialist outlet NK News, told The Washington Times. “They have not mentioned it at all since [Mr. Yoon’s] arrest.”

North Korea watchers suggest sound reasons for this prudence: Were ordinary North Koreans exposed to the legal overthrow of a national leader amid mass displays of free expression and free assembly, they might take a more critical view of their own ruling class and system.

That class is a privileged elite that has kept an iron grip on power in Pyongyang for 76 years while that system denies ordinary citizens the most basic rights and freedoms.

“By making some coverage about the current situation in South Korea, maybe North Korean people could indirectly have a glimpse of the democratic system in South Korea,” Kim Gum-kyok, a North Korean defector and South Korean TV commentator, told foreign reporters in Seoul last week.

North Korean state media generated unwanted domestic blowback with its coverage of mass protests that sparked the ouster of South Korea’s last conservative president, Park Geun-hye, in 2016.

“People read between the lines and were envious of the level of South Korean democratization and of accountability of corrupt people in power,” said Sokeel Park, country director of the nongovernmental Liberty in North Korea, citing defectors who left in the years afterward. “It was an unintended message.”

Decades earlier, news distributed in North Korea inadvertently exposed residents to South Korea’s economic prosperity.

“Back in the 1980s, reports on political unrest caused some North Koreans to get some information on the level of development in South Korea, which was unintended by the North Korean government,” Mr. Park said.

At the time, news photos and footage from Seoul showed violent confrontations between pro-democracy demonstrators and massed ranks of riot police. In the background, the North’s censors failed to block out apparent signs of the South’s wealth, such as high-rise buildings, modern infrastructure and streets packed with private vehicles.

Behind the Kim regime’s information firewall, outside content presents risks. That means international news requires careful management and timely reporting of events in Seoul is not a priority for Pyongyang’s propagandists.

“North Korean media did not report [South Korean] martial law for about a week, or nine days,” said the defector Mr. Kim, who escaped to the South in 2012. “I believe … the North Korean regime wanted to first grasp a picture of the surroundings, of the happenings.”

Kim’s silent war

The November dispatch of North Korean troops to help Russia in its war with Ukraine, a far bigger news story for North Koreans, has not been reported in the official press.

“They have not mentioned it at all,” Ms. Chung said.

Some suspect Pyongyang is supporting Moscow because it makes ideological sense for authoritarian, rogue states to battle jointly against Western-backed Kyiv.

Analysts say the real reason Pyongyang is partnering with the Kremlin is transactional: North Korea’s alliance with Russia lessens its dependence on China while earning diplomatic cover, grain, fuel, weapons technologies and cash.

That message is not easy to propagate among a populace that had not been conditioned to view Ukraine as an enemy.

“The regime is unable to justify the fact that they have sent 12,000 soldiers. … They can’t find any reasonable reason,” said Mr. Kim. “Ukraine is not the enemy of North Korea, and if [the public] finds out that they have to fight for Russia, not even China, they would not want to sacrifice their lives.”

Russian forces hold the initiative on the battlefield, but no clear-cut win is in sight. “I believe that the North Korean regime is not confident of victory,” Mr. Kim said.

In a high-intensity, high-casualty war, Pyongyang will have increasing difficulty keeping its soldiers’ involvement secret from the public.

“If they are very confident, they can tell their people that they wanted to counter the U.S. by neutralizing Ukraine,” Mr. Kim said. “But if Russia loses … it is going to be a hard situation for the North Korean regime.”

This vulnerability offers a unique opportunity for governments and organizations opposed to the Kim regime.

“It is clear that Kim Jong-un does not care about the lives of North Korean soldiers, but we can clearly see he cares about loss of control over information,” Mr. Park said. “What he is doing in Russia is a big gamble, and it’s in the interest of the international community to make that a losing bet — in terms of information operations to North Korean soldiers in Kursk and to domestic audiences inside North Korea.”