Collateral Damage

Whether things happen randomly or for cosmic reasons, the fallout from the arrest, detainment and conviction in North Korea of American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee has been wide-ranging and, in some cases, surprising. Although refugee experts have expressed concern that the camera footage seized from the @Current team may have exposed and endangered interviewees, chances are those featured are already known to North Korean intelligence and-or participated in a way that did not divulge details beyond those inherent to their risky flight.

Ling and Lee’s fate has complicated @BarackObama and Secretary Clinton’s foreign policy efforts, tarnished for some the image of @Current co-founder @AlGore and muddied the personal reputation of veteran producer and cameraman Mitch Koss. But in the end, when all is said and done, the real question will be whether all this has a permanent, negative effect on the fortunes of Current TV.

Early on, the State Department made it clear that it had not ordered @Current to maintain a policy of public silence (or merciless website monitoring). Since then, speculation has revolved around the idea that, fearful of abetting some sort of legal liability that could threaten a re-launch of their recently scuttled IPO, the network decided to opt for the safer, less popular route.

While a recent press release touting the arrival of new @Current CEO Mark Rosenthal boasted that the website Current.com is accessed by seven million monthly unique visitors, the measurement service Quantcast places the figure at 2.6 million. Barring a top-notch, behind-the scenes documentary rationalization of @Current’s Ling-Lee policies, the San Francisco-headquartered network may well remember this very unfortunate contretemps as a lost opportunity to stem the tide of November 2008 layoffs, diminishing ad revenues and a user-generation model that was locked down at a time when it was needed most.

Filed under: Media

Hopscotch Journalism

The July 9th musings of a U.S. scholar, Dr. Han S. Park, after the latest of nearly four dozen visits to North Korea lead to an incorrectly optimistic headline in the July 12th editions of the New York Daily News as well as a misleading syndicated piece originating in today’s @Sacbee_news. An uncorroborated July 13th missive by a South Korean cable TV channel has half the world authoritatively now assuming that Kim Jong-il is dying of pancreatic cancer.

These are but the latest examples of how the run-and-gun nature of today’s wired media world, when combined with the public’s renewed appetite for news about the world’s most secretive regime, can lead to reporting that fails to adhere to even something as basic as the three-source rule. Laura Ling and Euna Lee may go to Pyongsong Prison; no, wait, it actually might be another relatively mild labor camp near Pyongyang in Sariwon; oops, hold that thought, the pair are at a medical facility in the for-show capitol; darn, per the aforementioned Park (who has yet to reveal the names-nature of the “officials” he spoke to in North Korea), it is in fact a comfortable guest villa, probably the same one that the two American journalists have been in all along. (Even all that fearful coverage of a possible July 4th North Korea missile launch towards Hawaii was based on a single, unnamed source article in a Japanese newspaper.)

As someone who has been closely monitoring the ebb and flow of Ling-Lee information and tweeting the most relevant and interesting new developments, I can honestly say that the media coverage has been no worse for the factual wear than that of Michael Jackson’s death or the Air France tragedy over the Atlantic Ocean. These are the times we live in; 24-hour cable news channels, blogs that are ten time zones ahead and the smorgasbord known as the Internet all feverishly stir the topic du hour.

In the case of Ling and Lee, much of the coverage has been necessarily speculative, first because their employer, families and the State Department maintained a complete, strategic silence, and then due to the muddy nature of their cross-border trail. Even when North Korea’s state news agency KCNA released a far more detailed Ling-Lee post-trial explanation in Korean than it did in English, all people in the U.S. got were excerpts from the less expansive and revealing latter report. So, as we wade through yet another critical juncture of the Ling-Lee saga, just remember to take any breathless new report with a grain of Tumen River sand.

Filed under: Media

Acknowledging the Ling-Lee Backlash

The night before this week’s latest round of Laura Ling-Euna Lee vigils, @lisaling proved once again how useful it is in these trying times to have the toolset of a hardened journalist. Not once but twice, during a half-hour interactive TV and online appearance in Sacramento with @SharonItonNews10, she calmly responded to the latter’s relaying of cruel online comments about the fate of the two journalists with the assertion that all opinions being expressed is a necessary aspect of this country’s freedom of speech provisions.

And make no mistake; since the State Department first confirmed on June 12th that Ling, Lee and producer-cameraman Mitch Koss did indeed step across the Chinese-North Korean border, the number of articles, blogs and online comments stating that the punishment fits the crime has increased exponentially. Though some of these items are tempered with a desire to see the pair released, others are anchored in a firm belief that no sympathy is in order here (especially considering the risk taken was one that was not germane to the story these journalists were reporting).

Which is why this week’s shift from a humanitarian Ling-Lee plea to one of amnesty is in some ways the first time the matter has felt completely aligned. After months of debate about whether or not Ling and Lee crossed the border on March 17th and how cognizant they should have been that North Korea falls into the category of countries that does not detain-and-deport members of the fifth estate, it comes down to Laura Ling this past Tuesday making statements such as the following one to husband Iain Clayton: “We have been tried, we have confessed, we have been sentenced and we need to start from that position.”

In short order, a Wednesday conference call between the families and the State Department has been followed by official requests of amnesty for Ling and Lee by State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly yesterday and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today. You can’t blame the families and politicians for playing the humanitarian card (especially given Ling’s pre-existing medical condition), but let’s face it, bargaining from the starting point of an admission of guilt seems to be a strategy that has a much higher chance of breaking through the North Korean government’s intransigence.

Filed under: Media

Pondering @NYTimesKristof’s Question

In the shadow of this afternoon’s Laura Ling-Euna Lee vigil in Chicago and four more candlelight gatherings tonight in New York, Los Angeles, Portland and Orlando, the matter of two @Current journalists detained in North Korea since March 17th (without certain contingencies guaranteed by international human rights charters) has yet to ignite the media consciousness. But how is that even possible, given that we’re talking about two – innocent – female – American – citizens, hijacked nine – weeks – ago in the middle of a legitimate – reporting – assignment?

Or, as @NYTimesKristof tweeted this morning: “Why hasn’t North Korea’s imprisonment of U.S. journalists, e.g. @LiberateLaura, provoked more concern?” The only prominent U.S. journalist to be in lock-step with @NYTimesKristof is @MSNBC’s @Maddow, who last night interviewed @GovRichardson about Ling and Lee.

So what gives? Is the lack of convenient access to talking-head family members and Current TV folks leading TV show producers at places like @kingsnthings to move on to another topic? Does the media believe that a muted M.O. best serves the back channel approach being employed by the State Department? Probably, and who cares?

It’s time for the U.S. broadcast media to embrace the moral outrage articulated by @NYTimesKristof and many other followers @LiberateLaura, and get on this story. Heck, tonight’s New York vigil will be taking place directly in front of Rockefeller Center, a.k.a. the U.S. news media’s number one namesake nerve center, the place where everyone from @anncurry to @jimmyfallon to Brian Williams to @datelinenbc’s Chris Hansen earn their keep. So c’mon, Rockefeller reporters… This is a great story that you can cover without cab fare. As we grind on towards the dreaded date of a June 4th Ling-Lee trial, we – frankly – need your help.

Filed under: Commentary, Media

Applauding the Politics of Restraint

A U.S. politician who knows a thing or two about successfully negotiating the release of Americans detained in North Korea has voiced his support for @BarackObama’s restrained approach to the case of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Speaking @Maddow on Wednesday, May 20^th, @GovRichardson said it is wise to keep separate the humanitarian side of such matters from any diplomatic efforts.

New Mexico Governor Richardson, who helped broker the release of Americans from North Korea in both 1994 and 1996,  took it a step further. Suggesting that he would “get in trouble for saying this,” he argued that the North Koreans have also shown relative restraint in their criticism of Ling and Lee, avoiding for example the use of the word espionage when talking about the pair’s alleged transgressions.

Richardson has talked to the families of both Ling and Lee as well as with Current TV co-founder @AlGore, who finally broke his public silence last Friday. Noting that North Korea “obviously sees the two women as possible bargaining chips,” Richardson hinted that much will now depend on what happens at the trial scheduled for June 4^th.

Perhaps most intriguing were Richardson’s descriptions of the North Korean brain trust. The Governor described Ling and Lee’s captors as unpredictable, able to use the media very well and highly sensitive to any perceived insults.

Filed under: Media