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Anatomy of a fake news campaign: Media spreads lie from US govt-funded Korean outlet that Kim Jong-un died

Corporate media outlets spread fake news claiming North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had died. The lie originated with a Seoul-based website funded by the US government’s regime-change arm the NED.

by Ben Norton

Part 2 - US government’s NED bankrolls anti-DPRK fake news mill

The Daily NK is a South Korea-based propaganda outlet funded by Washington to conduct information warfare against the government in the north. It was founded by anti-DPRK activists who coalesced around the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights.

This network has received millions of dollars in grants from the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA cutout.

NED funding for the Daily NK itself goes back well over a decade, to when it was founded. A search of the NED grants database shows that the Daily NK received $400,000 in US government funding in 2019 alone, and at least $1.2 million in American tax dollars between 2016 and 2019.

Ho Park, the head of North Korean research at Daily NK and one of the publication’s co-founders, is a grantee who has been publicly honored by the NED.

The US-backed Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights is also linked to another major grantee called the Unification Media Group, which was given at least $2.4 million from the NED between 2016 and 2019.

The NED notes on its website that the South-Korea based Unification Media Group consists of the Daily NK, Radio Free Chosun, and Open North Korea Radio.

In other words, the US government has over the course of several decades carefully cultivated a cadre of anti-DPRK propaganda outlets in Seoul, using them to grease the wheels of a disinformation machine that regularly spreads fake news and rumors from North Korean defectors. This media apparatus is the spearhead of the US government’s campaign of hybrid warfare against the DPRK.

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