N. Korea Story: LATimes Suicide Wish?

Ensconced in their ivory tower, John Carroll and the crew at One Times Square might have forgotten that their newspaper is based in Los Angeles, the region with the largest Korean population in America: 209,734 Koreans call the LA basin home. And with North Korea: Without the Rancor played on page one Thursday morning, I bet there are 209,734 very pissed off Koreans who are about to let John Carroll know how they feel.

That's more than one angry Korean for every five LAT subscribers, now that LAT's circulation has slipped below a million. Carroll and his Alice in Wonderland crew might have thought about that before glossing over the murder, absolute lack of freedom, slave labor, grinding famine, and thorough lack of morality that is North Korea today. (If you somehow have missed a summary of the story's content click to Hugh or my earlier link.)

And don't forget the Vietnamese. The Los Angeles area has the largest Vietnamese population in the world, outside of Vietnam. I read the story on-line over lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant today, thanks to my nifty new little internet-anywhere card. (Imagine how illegal that would be in North Korea!) It was the perfect place to read the lies of the Information Ministry operative told in the story, particularly this line:

He believes that Americans have the wrongheaded notion that North Koreas are unhappy with the system of government under Kim Jong Il. "We Asians are traditional people," he said. "We prefer to have a benevolent father leader."

How many of the Vietnamese in the room with me would gag over that, having fled Vietnam and suffered the death of loved ones and the loss of everything to escape their "benevolent father leader," Ho Chi Minh? How did they feel when they read in the LAT that oppression in the US is really not that much different than oppression under the cruel heel of a Communist dictator? Or that it is Bush, not a brutally repressive Communist dictatorship, that is to blame for the desperate state of the North Korean people?

I hope Koreans by the thousands are on the doorstep of One Times Square this morning, protesting loudly and vigorously, keeping the spotlight on this repulsive story, fanning the flames of outrage, and hastening much-needed head-rolling reform at this sad institution. One hopes that someone at The Tribune Company realizes that blind, arrogant and hatefully biased, the Carroll/Wonderland team is marching on to oblivion.