I’m sure everyone has heard about the mainstream media’s embrace of North Korea’s charming smiles at the Olympics. I like to listen to the Ben Shapiro podcast, the Andrew Klavan podcast, and the Daily Signal podcast and they ALL talked about it. But I wanted to tell people the truth, and remind people that this isn’t the first time that mainstream media types have covered up atrocities in order to make their heroes look good.

The Daily Signal posted celebratory tweets from seven different mainstream media sources: CNN, ThinkProgress, The New York Times, Politico, Reuters, and a bureau chief of the Washington Post.

The New York Times tweeted: “Without a word, only flashing smiles, Kim Jong-un’s sister outflanked Vice President Mike Pence in diplomacy” and Reuters tweeted: “North Korea judged winner of diplomatic gold at Olympics”.

Before we go any further, let’s learn a bit about starvation in North Korea from a radically leftist source: Newsweek.

Excerpt:

Roughly 18 million people in North Korea are not getting enough food, a United Nations report released this week found. That means 70 percent of the isolated nation’s population relies on food assistance to get by, including 1.3 million children under the age of five.

“Amidst political tensions, an estimated 18 million people across DPRK [North Korea] continue to suffer from food insecurity and undernutrition, as well as a lack of access to basic services,” the U.N. report said. “Furthermore, 10.5 million people, or 41 percent of the total population, are undernourished.”

North Koreans also need basic healthcare and sanitation, the U.N. report determined. Without safe water or better sanitation and hygiene, diarrhea and pneumonia have become the leading cause of death for children under five, the report said.

The radically-leftist NBC News reports on the concentration camps:

Atrocities committed by North Korea against its own people are “strikingly similar” to those perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II, the head of a United Nations panel said Monday after publishing an unprecedented report.

The year-long investigation called for urgent action by the international community to stop allleged crimes against humanity committed by Kim Jong Un and his regime.

[…]But the report also shed new light on the country’s darkest side – its labor camps.

As many as 120,000 North Koreans are thought to be imprisoned across the country, many of them in four large camps. This number may have shrunk in recent years, according to the report, but only because many of the inmates have been murdered or starved to death.

People and their families are held for arbitrary crimes such as “gossiping” about the state.

[…]The U.N. report contains more of this harrowing testimony, which it says is tantamount to “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence.” It compared conditions to camps run by the Nazis during World War II and gulags set up in Soviet Russia.

This is what the mainstream media declined to mention while they were praising a woman smiling and Mike Pence frowning as some great evidence of moral equivalence between North Korea and the United States of America.

This is not the first time that the mainstream media has covered up for forced starvation, imprisonment and mass murders.

Here’s another case written about in The Weekly Standard.

Excerpt:

AT LONG LAST a Pulitzer Prize committee is looking into the possibility that the Pulitzer awarded to Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent whose dispatches covered up Stalin’s infamies, might be revoked.In order to assist in their researches, I am downloading here some of the lies contained in those dispatches, lies which the New York Times has never repudiated with the same splash as it accorded Jayson Blair’s comparatively trivial lies:

“There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.”
–New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1

“Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”
–New York Times, August 23, 1933

“Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin’s program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding.”
–New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
–New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 18

“There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”
–New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13

I would like to add another Duranty quote, not in his dispatches, which is reported in a memoir by Zara Witkin, a Los Angeles architect, who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. (“An American Engineer in Stalin’s Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934,” University of California Press ). The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP’s Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:

Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.

And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day.

And that is how mainstream media journalists think about the people who are harmed by their leftist policies – whether it be the unborn, children raised without one or more biological parents, families who cannot get make ends meet, innocent people murdered by terrorists and other criminals, etc. Kill them all, as long as big government is in control, making everyone “equal”. Journalists want to call evil “good”, and good “evil”, until the people are so confused that they lose the ability to judge the crimes of Marxist regimes.

You can get the facts about the forced starvation of Ukrainian civilians – in this article from the center-left The Atlantic, written by historian Anne Applebaum.

Here’s one quote:

In the years 1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union. It began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join state farms. It was then exacerbated, in the autumn of 1932, when the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside. Despite the shortages, the state demanded not just grain, but all available food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and local Party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful propaganda, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, and farm animals. At the same time, a cordon was drawn around the Ukrainian republic to prevent escape. The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the Soviet Union. Among them were nearly 4 million Ukrainians who died not because of neglect or crop failure, but because they had been deliberately deprived of food.

Neither the Ukrainian famine nor the broader Soviet famine were ever officially recognized by the USSR. Inside the country the famine was never mentioned. All discussion was actively repressed; statistics were altered to hide it. The terror was so overwhelming that the silence was complete. Outside the country, however, the cover-up required different, subtler tactics. These are beautifully illustrated by the parallel stories of Walter Duranty and Gareth Jones.

Collectivization: that’s what the mainstream media loves. Everyone the same and equal, and no differences. Cogs in a machine, with no dissent from our watchful government above. When you look at North Korea, or Cuba or Venezuela, you’re looking at the Marxist atheist ideal. Free people are so unpredictable, they say, that we need a big government if we want to avoid catastrophes like global warming and overpopulation. This is how leftists think – or should I say, this is how leftists feel. They don’t think.

Leftism starts with a feeling of superiority over one’s neighbor, and the desire to be delivered from these inferior people by an infallible government. Those stupid neighbors with their religion and their values – they are wasting food and electricity on their large families. They should be thrown into a concentration camp, so that they don’t teach their children their mistaken values, e.g. – chastity, sobriety and natural marriage. Who can stop them from having views different from mine? The government can, if we enlightened people vote to make it big enough to control them.

It’s very important for people to understand what it is that they are consuming when they turn on television shows on CNN, or pick up a New York Times newspaper.