Reading the Dictators’ Newspapers

Search

Sign In

Menu

Search

Log In

Hide menu

About

The Magazine

Team

Pitch Form

FAQ

Subscribe

Issues Archive

Articles

Animals

Shop

Podcast

Donate

This is a search field with an auto-suggest feature attached.

There are no suggestions because the search field is empty.

Reading the Dictators’ Newspapers

The Pyongyang Times and the Tehran Times are both ludicrous propaganda outlets. In that way, they’re just like our media in the United States.

Alex Skopic

filed 30 October 2025<br>in

International

Everybody’s got their favorite newspaper or magazine—the one they turn to first thing in the morning, breakfast fork in hand, for a look at what’s going on in the world. Noam Chomsky, famously, prefers the Financial Times, calling it “more open, more free, often more critical” because it’s where the rich and powerful speak frankly to one another. Joan Didion praised the Berkeley Barb, the Open City, and the other “underground” papers of 1960s California as among “the only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire.” Your own periodicals of choice might be the Detroit Free Press or Drop Site News, or if you have especially good taste, Current Affairs. But there are some papers I read regularly that are a little different from those. Almost nobody else in the United States reads them, but I think they tell us some important things about our country and the world, though probably not in the way their writers intend. You see, I’m a loyal reader of the Pyongyang Times and the Tehran Times.

Now, it’s not that I’m a political supporter of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or of the ironically named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), better known as North Korea. Far from it. And it’s not that I even think these papers convey much in the way of accurate or useful information. In fact, their pages contain some of the most blatant propaganda I’ve ever seen. They’re often absurd, abhorrent, or both at once. But that’s precisely why they’re so valuable, because in their crude sledgehammer proselytizing for their particular regimes, they give us a blueprint for how to recognize more subtle forms of propaganda when we encounter them right here at home.

Let’s begin by opening a crisp new Pyongyang Times—or rather, looking at the paper’s somewhat janky website, since physical copies are hard to come by here in the States. Founded in 1965, the Times is the only English-language newspaper in North Korea. It’s a weekly, usually 12 pages long, and most of the articles are translated from either the Rodong Sinmun (which serves the entire DPRK) or the more regional Pyongyang Sinmun. Like most things in North Korea, all of the above are state-owned and run. By itself, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; after all, so are PBS and the BBC, and while they have their problems, they’re perfectly serviceable news outlets. More so, in fact, than privately-owned ones in the same countries, like the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when you read the Pyongyang Times, it’s obvious that they’re not exactly publishing straightforward news coverage. Instead, you get all the Juche that’s fit to print.

The first thing you notice on the Pyongyang Times website is that a high percentage of the headlines start with the words “Respected Comrade Kim Jong Un,” followed by something completely banal. At the time of writing, the paper’s top story was “Respected Comrade Kim Jong Un guides construction of Sinuiju Combined Greenhouse Farm again” —the “again” is a lovely little cherry on top, suggesting that he wasn’t quite satisfied with it the first time. A few days prior, it was “Respected Comrade Kim Jong Un sees grand mass gymnastics and artistic performance with participants in celebrations and support team members.” Before that, “Respected Comrade Kim Jong Un visits Kumsusan Palace of Sun.” All of these stories, if you can call them stories, are compiled in a sidebar called “GENERAL SECRETARY KIM JONG UN’S REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES,” which seems to serve the purpose a weekly sports column or Garfield comic might in an American newspaper.

Thank you, Chairman Kim, very cool.

Apparently, the editors don’t mind that the REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES aren’t very, well, revolutionary. There are countless high-res photos of Kim Jong Un getting on and off trains, standing around at construction sites, writing letters to the leaders of whichever countries are still speaking to him, and just generally peering off into the middle distance. Kim is never criticized, obviously, and there’s a notable lack of specifics about any political decisions he might have made. If your only source of news was the Pyongyang Times, you’d get the impression he was a kind of lovable national mascot, rather than a world leader. I wouldn’t put it past the paper to publish “Respected Comrade Kim...