Despite massive backlash online and from the alternative media, CNN continued to heap praise on North Korea Monday, with international reporter Will Ripley claiming that the winter Olympics have provided the dictatorship with a ‘diplomatic win’.
“If you’re Kim Jong Un, it was definitely a diplomatic win,” Ripley told CNN host Wolf Blitzer.
“He sent his telegenic younger sister Kim Yo Jong here to Pyeongchang. She delivered a letter inviting South Korea’s President Moon Jae In to visit North Korea. He accepted on principle, they had photo-ops at hockey games, they had dinners, smiles, handshakes.” Ripley continued.
“It was optics—everything that Kim Jong Un wanted,” Ripley noted.
The reporter then went even further, suggesting that such ‘optics’ have been damaging for the US.
“If you’re the United States, however, well, it’s kind of a loss,” Ripley said. “Vice President [Mike] Pence came here talking very strongly against North Korea. He met with defectors, he brought the father of Otto Warmbier, the American student who died after being released from North Korean custody.”
Ripley concluded that the US was “really put in a box here.”
CNN, as well as other media outlets, including the New York Times, last week heaped praise on Kim Yo Jong, the sister of the North Korean leader.
Appearing on Fox News, The Hill’s media reporter Joe Concha slammed the media for presenting a murderous regime in a positive light:
“She is not the shiny new object,” Concha said of Yo Jong, noting “You know her official title? This is the most insane thing I’ve ever heard. She is the director of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation, all right?”
“In terms of what is going on in North Korea, 18 million people are starving. That’s insane. 120,000 people in work camps. And you can go on and on and on in terms of the number of people that have been killed under this regime. And to give a headline like that without any context, that has been the danger here.” Concha urged.
“It is why critics, not just conservative critics but what I saw on social media all over the place left and right are slamming not just The New York Times, CNN, Reuters, ABC, NBC. You can go on and on,” Concha added. “This is across the board of glamorizing somebody like this who, again, runs propaganda and couldn’t ask for any better press if she wanted it from the U.S. media.”
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