November 19, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -  Major news outlets have resumed efforts to pressure President Donald Trump to pull back from trying to negotiate a deal with Pyongyang. In their latest salvo last week, The New York Times and CNN completely misrepresented the findings of a recent study of satellite photos of a North Korean missile base as evidence of bad faith and “deception” in talks with the United States.

A New York Times article bore the sensational headline, “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception.” In a breathless tone, the writers, David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, declared that the satellite images “suggest that North Korea has been engaging in a great deception,” because it had offered to dismantle a major launching site while “continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.”  

If such improvements had been made during the U.S.-North Korean exchanges, they have might well merit official and public attention—if they have given North Korea new capabilities for threatening the United States or its allies, as Sanger and Broad suggested. But a review of the study of the satellite images of the base reveals that it does not describe any such improvements as claimed by the Times. On the contrary, the study says the satellite images “show minor infrastructure changes to the base that are consistent with what is often seen at remote KPA {Korean People’s Army] bases of all types.”