SEPTEMBER 20, 2019
Media Omit Context Behind Latest North Korean Missile Tests
JOSHUA CHO
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In his 2004 book North Korea: Another Country, historian Bruce Cumings described the irony of corporate media’s perpetual narrative of North Korea as an unhinged or devious adversary of the US with hostile nuclear ambitions:
Almost always, media discussion of North Korea assumes that Washington is in a position of original innocence, and the North is assiduously trying to obtain and then to use “weapons of mass destruction”—the ubiquitous media trope for the arsenals of American enemies since the Cold War ended. Yet the American record in Northeast Asia since the 1940s is one of consistent use of, or threats to use, those same weapons.
Little has changed since then, as FAIR has documented the media’s one-sided tendency to cast Washington’s actions as defensive responses to “threats” from Official Enemies (Extra!, 5/13; FAIR.org, 6/6/19).
In covering North Korea’s series of missile tests over the past few months, US media continue to portray Pyongyang’s actions as unwarranted provocations to obtain an advantage over the US in negotiations, while dismissing the North’s stated objectives for their missile tests.
USA Today (8/2/19) depicts North Korean missile tests as “provocations”–while US/South Korean mock invasions of the North are dismissed as a “pretext.”
USA Today’s “Trump Dismisses North Korea Missile Tests. Experts Say He’s Giving Kim’s Regime a Free Pass” (8/2/19) portrayed Trump as an indulgent and careless leader taken advantage of by Kim Jong-un, for correctly noting that the latest short-range missile tests aren’t a violation of their 2018 Singapore commitment to halt long-range and nuclear missile testing, despite their violating UN Security Council resolutions.
The “expert” sources in the report described Trump as giving Kim an “invitation to push the envelope when it comes to additional provocations,” and dismissed North Korea’s stated rationale for these missile tests–that they are a protest against US/South Korea joint military exercises–as a “pretext” to “gain leverage” in future negotiations, without explaining the outcomes they hope to obtain from these negotiations.
The Washington Post’s alarmist “Fast, Low and Hard to Stop: North Korea’s Missile Tests Crank Up the Threat Level” (8/15/19) featured yet more “experts” who noted that North Korea’s missile tests “significantly raised the country’s military capabilities and the threat they pose to South Korea and US forces on the peninsula,” and showcased weapons designed “specifically to confound South Korea’s missile-defense system.” Like USA Today, the Post noted that the missile tests have the “additional benefit” of ramping up “pressure on the United States to return to the negotiating table with a better offer” than the one Trump presented to North Korea at Hanoi in February, without explaining how North Korea would like the agreement to be improved.
The New York Times’ “North Korea Missile Tests, ‘Very Standard’ to Trump, Show Signs of Advancing Arsenal” (9/2/19) informed readers that North Korea is testing missiles “with greater range and maneuverability” that could “overwhelm American defenses in the region,” and provide more evidence of a “program designed to defeat the defenses Japan has deployed, with American technology, at sea and on shore.” This in addition to threatening “at least eight American bases in those countries, housing more than 30,000 troops.”
The Times casually referred to US efforts under the Obama administration to launch covert cyberattacks on the country to sabotage its missile tests, as well as Trump’s threats to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” without describing his statements as “threats,” or noting that the Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review considers cyberattacks on “American infrastructure” grounds for a nuclear response (New York Times, 1/16/18).
CNN (9/9/19) creatively suggests that missiles that traveled less than 400 miles in tests could “threaten US.” (North Korea is 3,000 miles from Alaska, the closest state.)
CNN’s “North Korea Testing ‘Creative’ Weapons That Could Threaten US, Experts Say” (9/9/19) reported that “experts” claim that North Korea’s missile tests this year show that Pyongyang is “testing weapons to target weak points in the advanced missile defense system that protects the US, Japan and South Korea,” for “the first time” since it halted ballistic missile testing for 17 months since November 2017. Like the above reports, CNN noted that North Korea “suggested” that its missile tests are a response to US/South Korean joint military exercises, and Seoul’s purchase of American F-35 stealth fighter jets, without explaining why North Korea considers these actions so provocative.
I’ve noted before how the media consistently mislead readers by refusing to acknowledge how US “missile defense systems” are actually offensive systems (FAIR.org, 5/17/19, 7/12/19). One can easily imagine that US media would characterize as “threatening” countries allied against the US placing such systems near US borders, because it would help secure a nuclear first-strike advantage against the US by reducing the threat of retaliatory strikes. But media fail to acknowledge the US and South Korea’s own efforts to upgrade their missile capacities, and give scant coverage to US plans to install medium-range missiles near North Korea, following Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (FAIR.org, 3/7/18; Newsweek, 8/14/19).
Although some of the above reports correctly note that US/South Korean military exercises “have been scaled back to be less provocative,” and are now largely computer simulations, they diminish any rationale behind North Korea’s missile tests by omitting why the previous military exercises were so provocative in the first place. These “military exercises,” or war games, were notorious for simulating the invasion and occupation of North Korea, decapitation of the North Korean leadership and a nuclear first-strike (CounterSpin, 2/23/18). These reports also omit how these new war games continue to simulate the occupation of North Korea after an invasion (NK News, 8/10/19), and how the North’s missile tests began in May, months after the US first broke its Singapore agreement not to conduct more of these provocative war games (Financial Times, 8/28/18).
But more importantly, these reports effectively pretend that North Korea isn’t serious about wanting a halt to provocative US/South Korean war games, insisting that North Korea is actually seeking “leverage” for some hidden objective that is conveniently never outlined. This is consistent with corporate media’s tendency to obscure and misrepresent North Korea’s repeated offers to give up its nuclear weapons program as saying the opposite (Intercept, 8/25/17), while the Trump administration continues to reject China and North Korea’s numerous offers to suspend missile tests in exchange for a suspension of the threatening annual war games (South China Morning Post, 11/17/17; New York Times, 6/21/19).
An elderly woman and grandchild survey the ruins of the Pyongyang home, bombed by the US during the Korean War.
These “war games” are not just theoretical exercises for the North Korean government; while both the US and North Korea have traded threats, only one of them has ever killed millions of the other’s people, and only one has used nuclear weapons offensively (FAIR.org, 9/27/17). The North remembers how up to 20 percent of the population were killed in the Korean War as the US dropped more bombs in Korea than it did in the entire Pacific theatre in World War II, targeting “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick on top of another,” as war supporter Dean Rusk, later secretary of State, put it (Washington Post, 3/24/15). The war is technically still ongoing, as the US never withdrew its troops or signed a peace treaty, as required by the 1953 armistice.
FAIR has already documented how corporate media consider the possibility of peace between North Korea and South Korea to be a threat to the US, despite reducing the likelihood of nuclear war (FAIR.org, 2/14/18, 3/15/18, 6/14/18). The false depiction of North Korea as an intractable enemy serves as a convenient scapegoat for the failure of Washington’s aggressive policy of “maximum pressure” to achieve peace and denuclearization in the Korean peninsula.
Preserving the North Korean bogeyman bolsters the longstanding bipartisan US policy of maintaining a military presence in Asia against China (CounterPunch, 9/22/17; Wall Street Journal, 1/15/19). It also allows the US to pursue the same objectives it had when it entered the Korean civil war on behalf of South Korea’s capitalist system in 1950, and supports what the Trump administration calls a “free and open Indo-Pacific” (for US investments). Compared to this agenda, torpedoing the denuclearization of the Korea peninsula (Truthout, 9/24/18) seems a small price to pay.
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Joshua Cho
Joshua Cho is a writer based in New York.
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