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Alert on James Brooke's Korean coverage in the New York Times
Michael Munk
11/23/04 "ICH" -- James Brooke, a New York Times correspondent in Asia, is developing into another Judith Miller, notorious for her role as a transmission belt for neocon lies about
WMD in Iraq. He is enabling similar rightist groups to propagandize NYT readers about Korean politics--North and South. He
regularly characterizes the views of rightwing South Koreans as "mainstream" while disparaging leftist opinion and copying rightists who regard even the elected South Korean government as "soft" on North Korea.
In a Nov. 20 dispatch from Mongolia, he credits rightist US groups such as the anti-feminist "Concerned Women for America" and a small group of Korean students in the US called "Liberation in North Korea" with what he calls a "mainstream" campaign to "ease the plight of fleeing North Koreans." Brooke does not inform his readers that "Concerned Women's" actual priority has been to attack GOP Sen Arlen Spector as
insufficiently anti abortion and that "Liberation" was hastily set up to counter a much larger movement among Korean-Americans to support Korean
unification and independence from the US. In the same report, he uses the newspaper Segye Times as a source for North Korean opinion without noting that it is one of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's stable of reactionary papers led by the Washington Times.
As Judy Miller helped to mislead Americans to support the neocon's invasion and occupation of Iraq, so may we look back on James Brooke's reporting if they invade another of Bush's "Axis of Evil" in the future.
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