Thoughts on BBC Panorama's "North Korea Undercover"

Cursory nod to the more popular articles and some varying points of view:

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/15/lse-students-north-korea-bbc
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s1mfw
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/15/why-is-lse-making-fuss-over-panorama
• https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/bbc-to-immediately-withdraw-the-planned-program-issue-a-full-apology-to-lse

And so on.

I am not a fan of Panorama. It is BBC series which goes undercover to discover many sordid truths from drug and child trafficking to various scams to this main course, North Korea.

But I feel like the standard of the documentary just did not live up to the risk it incurred. What if the DRPK government saw this and banned all LSE students and staff, past or future from going and declared war on the BBC?

Journalism exists to undercover the truth and freedom of speech allows for a range of views. But documentaries are also sources and sources have a bias. There are limitations to what one can learn from a source.

In this case, it was a week long tour of North Korea's grandiose dream. But I feel that all that hidden camera footage and John Sweeney's reporting...it really failed to say anything significant. Thankfully, the documentary was redeemed by several interviews which Sweeney and BBC conducted with the North Korean defectors. Those were far more harrowing.

But Panorama does nothing. It raises awareness about the most secluded nation in the world. Our views on North Korea have absolutely nothing to do with how the North Koreans themselves. 30 minutes of footage taken inside North Korea is not going to tell us the whole story.


Why was there a North and South Korea in the first place? etc.

For anyone seeking to really "experience" dystopia, I would recommend helping yourself to Zamyatin, Solzhenitsyn or Orwell. Real life totalitarian states are more fiction than fact.