Elements of American show business and North Korean propaganda briefly fused on Friday, when the former basketball star Dennis Rodman told reporters in Pyongyang that North Koreans “love” their new leader, Kim Jong-un. “And guess what?” the athlete turned reality TV star added, “I love him — the guy’s awesome.”
Speaking with the regional knowledge of a man who seemed to believe less than 48 hours ago that the upscale Seoul neighborhood featured in the global pop hit “Gangnam Style” was not in South Korea but somewhere in the impoverished North, Mr. Rodman parted with these words of praise for the heir to the Kim dynasty: “Guess what? His grandfather and his father were great leaders.”
Unsurprisingly, the former Chicago Bull’s visit, along with three current Harlem Globetrotters and a crew from “Vice,” the HBO “news magazine series” that arranged the trip, was extensively covered on North Korean state television, which is no more averse to reporting on staged events as news than the producers of the American reality television shows Mr. Rodman now gets paid to spice up.
Footage of the party’s arrival in Pyongyang was broadcast on Wednesday, and Mr. Kim and Mr. Rodman’s watching an exhibition game together, before adjourning to the leader’s palace for sushi, was a featured news item on Thursday.
In newsrooms not owned and run by the North Korean government, though, there has been some debate about whether any of these stage-managed events could fairly be described as news.
According to the producers of “Vice,” their new television program — inspired by the “thinking man’s lad magazine” of the same name — promises to be “an honest approach to documentary journalism.” But you don’t have to be Werner Heisenberg to wonder if the fact that they orchestrated this “basketball diplomacy mission” so they could film it raises questions about whether they were observing and documenting life in North Korea as it is or bringing a new form of reality television to the isolated nation.
As readers who watched the observational documentary “Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times” might recall, the founder of Vice magazine who led its expansion into filmmaking, Shane Smith — who is featured in a promotion for the new series — explained to my colleague David Carr in 2010 that his approach was perhaps more like a form of extreme tourism than journalism. “I’m not a journalist,” he said during a particularly salty exchange. “I’m not there to report.”
The Lede: With Rodman Stunt, American Reality TV and North Korean Propaganda Fuse
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The Lede: With Rodman Stunt, American Reality TV and North Korean Propaganda Fuse
