James Taranto says I was silly to point out the report from North Korea’s KCNA news service about a gift presented to dictator Kim Jong Il by former CNN Chief News Executive Eason Jordan: It’s Ronery at the Top.

The Eason Jordan kerfuffle is really getting silly now. Blogger Charles Johnson points to a 1997 “report” from KCNA (second item), the North Korean “news” agency, titled “Gift to Secy. Kim Jong Il from CNN official”:

Secretary Km Jong Il received a gift from Eason Jordan, President of the Newsgathering and International Network of the CNN of the United States, who is on a visit to Korea. Eason Jordan asked Kim Yong Sun, Chairman of the Korean Asia-Pacific Peace Committee and Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea Central Committee, to convey the gift to Secretary Kim Jong Il.

Curiously, Johnson does not question the veracity of this report, even though it comes from an official arm of the North Korean regime. Talk about your biased MSM outfits! Where are all the bloggers demanding full disclosure of the KCNA author’s conflicts of interest? (Why, the author isn’t even named!)

As it turns out, there is some corroboration for the KCNA “report.” It comes from Scott Fisher, an American expat living in Seoul, who visited North Korea in 2002 and wrote a lengthy travelogue that appears on the Web site 1stopkorea.com. Fisher visited the “Kim Jong Il Shrine,” near the Chinese border, where gifts to the “dear leader” (or is it “great leader”?) are on display:

Ever wonder why CNN seems to be the only Western news organization regularly allowed into North Korea? The next room perhaps offered a clue. In the “Gifts from America” room a whole section of one wall is taken up by gifts from CNN. A few engraved plaques, a coffee cup (yeah, a freaking coffee cup!), a logo ashtray, etc. Probably at most a couple hundred bucks worth of crap that nonetheless get pride of place in the museum—for they reveal obvious signs of respect from a world famous news organization.

That’s it? In April 2003, when Jordan admitted suppressing news so as to maintain access to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, that was a genuine outrage. Now bloggers are attacking Jordan for giving a dictator crap?

I’m not sure why I should question the veracity of the report from KCNA, any more than I would question a report from, say, CNN; I trust that LGF’s readers are grown-up enough to know where KCNA is coming from, but what reason could they possibly have to lie about this?

Taranto’s comments about “full disclosure” and “conflicts of interest” make no sense in this context; I assume they’re intended to make light of my statement that it’s questionable for an editor to defend himself against conflict of interest charges in an unsigned editorial. But more than a few Wall Street Journal readers seem to feel the same way.

I’m also not sure how merely posting the report qualifies as “attacking” Jordan. I thought it was interesting that a top CNN executive had cozy relationships with three of the world’s worst dictators: Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, and Kim Jong Il. Not earth-shaking news, but worthy of a post. Perhaps when I’m a bit older, I’ll understand how silly I was to even notice.

UPDATE at 2/15/05 3:23:16 pm:

Dinocrat has more on Eason Jordan’s many trips to North Korea; looks like maybe my instincts about what’s newsworthy aren’t so amateurish after all: What else did Eason Jordan give North Korea?

UPDATE at 2/15/05 3:34:45 pm:

And for even more about Eason Jordan’s hobnobbing with the world’s despots, read this comment from LGF operative zombie and scroll down for quite a few more links.

THE AUSTRALIAN
May 5, 1997

CNN REPACKAGES THE WORLD
by SUE WILLIAMS

ON the Monday, CNN executive Eason Jordan was sipping tea with Cuban President Fidel Castro, concluding months of delicate negotiations about the establishment of the first overseas news bureau in Havana since Associated Press was kicked out in 1969. By Friday, Jordan was in North Korea, the first Western journalist to set eyes on the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il, pressing his case for a similar base in the capital, Pyongyang.

UPDATE at 2/15/05 4:34:00 pm:

James Taranto quotes Scott Fisher’s account of his visit to the Kim Jong-Il Shrine:

Ever wonder why CNN seems to be the only Western news organization regularly allowed into North Korea? The next room perhaps offered a clue. In the “Gifts from America” room a whole section of one wall is taken up by gifts from CNN. A few engraved plaques, a coffee cup (yeah, a freaking coffee cup!), a logo ashtray, etc. Probably at most a couple hundred bucks worth of crap that nonetheless get pride of place in the museum—for they reveal obvious signs of respect from a world famous news organization.

That’s an odd place to end the quote, though, when the last two sentences of that paragraph are:

The people at CNN are certainly using their heads and showing they know how to play the game. Though one wonders how that fits in with journalistic integrity …