Business Insider Updates North Korea Puff Piece to Reflect ‘Reliance on Propaganda’

Business Insider published a piece this weekend extolling the wonders of North Korea’s new Pyongyang Sunan International Airport, which it claimed would put western airports to shame. The post was replete with glowing photos of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un smiling and strutting through the brand-new, state-of-the-art facility, which has “room to grow”:

Thaaaaaat’s awkward, given that North Korea, like most totalitarian regimes, relies upon a curtain of propaganda to cloak its citizens’ extraordinary poverty. (It’s not above Photoshopping, either.) You may even recall a straight-to-streaming film about this.

On Monday morning, the post received a number of corrections, starting with this one:

The following tidbit was added:

MarketWatch notes that there are only a few airlines that fly in and out of North Korea, so the airport isn’t likely to see much business. Most of North Korea’s tourists are from Russia and China, which are the oppressive country’s biggest allies.

And here’s what happened to that “room to grow” mentioned above:

It also appears Kim Jong-un’s role in designing the airport was not as active as initially thought:

Other changes took the excitement level down a bit, and indicated there was no way to tell whether any of these photos depicted reality:

became:

became:

became:

became:

Also, that errant apostrophe in the headline got fixed. It was unclear at press time how much food this giant photo-op could have purchased for the North Korean people.

[Image via screengrab]

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