Warning! This is from the Daily Express. Proceed with salt at the ready.Britons are paying to humour the North Korean dictatorship
A group of 46 North Korean “journalists” are on a UK study course in media skills funded by the Foreign Office.
Critics say they are propagandists who risk execution if they publish anything critical of their tyrant ruler. Lord Alton of Liverpool, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea, accused the Foreign Office of “investing in people who are official mouthpieces of the regime”.
He added: “In our parlance they’re spin-doctors. They’re there to promote the public relations of the government. It’s a pointless exercise.”
Andy Silvester of the TaxPayers’ Alliance told the Sunday Express: “Even if these journalists receive a damascene conversion to the merits of a free and fair press, they’re unlikely to have many chances to practise their new skills when they get home.”
The project, thought to be costing around £70,000, began with a 10-day workshop in North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, in October.
The 46 North Koreans are being taught “international reporting practices and the development of technical skills to build websites, using a variety of international sources,” Foreign Office minister Baroness Anelay revealed in a Lords written answer.
The participants will arrive here early next year “to see how multimedia websites work at British media companies”.
The Foreign Office, which claims the scheme will help open up the country’s brutally repressive political system, is paying the Thomson Foundation, an independent UK charity, to run the training sessions, based around “international standards of journalism”. A United Nations commission of inquiry report earlier this year found that in North Korea “the exercise of the right to express facts and opinions critical of the state or its official ideology is not tolerated”.
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