Hugh Hewitt has been chronicling the aftermath of Thursday’s embarassing puff piece on North Korea, which ran in a paper Hewitt aptly calls The Pyongyang Times of Los Angeles, and encourages readers to cc him and the Tribune Company with any letters they may have sent as well. So far, Hugh has received scores of letters, three of which are now posted under the entry I linked (scroll way down), but the Pyongyang Times has only published one letter on the subject, written by a certain Jong-Il Park, which gushes with praise.

Some might argue that this entry is premature, as I’ve only given the Times three days to write a dissenting letter. By way of comparison, OTLM’s rules, which I’m bending by cross-posting this, allow an entry under “Letters That Were Never Printed” only after a paper has gone a full week without running any letters making the points addressed in that letter. However, it’s one thing for the Pyongyang Times to run no letters on the topic for a week, if at all. It’s quite another to print only one solitary letter, which just “happens” to agree with the Times’s position, on a topic that has created anywhere near as much controversy as this piece has, where we all know the paper was inundated with letters expressing the opposite position. This is compounded by the fact that the Times’s usual practice is to run three or four letters on a single subject on a given day, almost always with at least one writer dissenting from the views expressed by the others.

Now, the best the L.A. Times can do is to run a competing letter two days after Park’s gushing letter, when Demick’s story is two days staler. That’s not to say they shouldn’t do it, of course; they should. But is it to say that even if they do, they’ll be at least two days late and two dollars short.

Below is my letter, which I sent to the Times yesterday.

Editor:

Barbara Demick’s feel-good article on North Korea was truly sickening. How naive must one be to fawningly quote an anonymous “businessman” and his even-more-anonymous colleague from a country whose government owns and controls all businesses, and which routinely tortures and murders any citizens who express any opinions contrary to those of the Dear Leader? If it wasn’t bad enough quoting these apparatchiks as though they were the average man-on-the-street, Demick made matters even worse by accusing the U.S. of “accusing” North Korea of developing the very nukes that both the government and Ms. Demick’s “businessmen” (but I repeat myself) have since openly admitted to owning. What’s next? An historical piece about wonderful the U.S.’s relations were with Germany and Japan following World War I, until the U.S. had to go and spoil everything by “accusing” one country of invading Poland and the other of bombing Pearl Harbor?

If telling the truth rather than playing Walter Duranty to today’s Josef Stalin is Demick’s idea of “rancor,” then may “rancor” isn’t such a bad thing after all.

Sincerely,
Xrlq

In the meantime, keep the letters coming, and be sure to cc me as well as Hugh and the Tribune. Better yet, why not post a copy of your unpublished letter in the comments area?

Cross-posted to Oh, That Liberal Media.

UPDATE: It’s now been a full week, and still not a single letter critical of the North Korean puff piece. Perhaps the Pyongyang Times of Los Angeles really is printed in Pyongyang.