Communists take gold in the shameless spin

Kim Jong-un’s sister was at the Olympics to charm us with her bone structure, and the media swallowed it

Say what you want about Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-un, but she’s got lovely bone structure. As she toured the Winter Olympics in South Korea, The Washington Post reported that the television cameras “zoomed in on her high cheekbones and fine ears”. The New York Times noted the buzz surrounding her “low-key makeup and the sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks”. No doubt about it, said CNN: “Kim Jong-un’s sister is stealing the show at the Winter Olympics.”

And what did this Korean Kissinger actually say? Nothing. Not a word. She just smiled, which was enough, according to The New York Times, for her to “outflank” the Americans. And here was I, thinking that we no longer celebrate girls whose only ambition is to hang around at sporting events looking pretty.

Western coverage of North Korea is an utter mess because we’ve never really understood what the regime is all about. Journalists will say their upbeat reporting of Ms Kim is an accurate reflection of the warm reception that she’s received among South Koreans, and, yes, many locals have been curious to get to know her. However, the context of South Korean coverage is very different to our own: they live in daily fear of being bombed into the sea. Any glimpse of humanity from the Kim family is welcomed with hope, tempered by experience.

Nothing justifies NBC’S coverage of the army of cheerleaders that the North has sent to the Games, who wear identical red uniforms and chant in unison like some disco-themed parody of The Handmaid’s Tale. They are “so satisfying to watch”, tweeted NBC. The same NBC that flew anchor Lester Holt to North Korea before the Games to film from one of its ski resorts – which Holt described as a “source of immense pride for a country trying to present a new and modern face to the world”. Behind him, a few dozen North Koreans slipped about nervously in identical outfits, some of them looking suspiciously like they’d never skied before in their lives.

I bet you all the tea in Red China that Holt’s report was repeated endlessly on North Korean television – along with the praise for what Reuters called Kim Yo-jong’s “diplomacy gold”. That’s what Communists do. They use international events not only to project a wholesome image on to the world stage, but also to show the folks back home just how respected, how admired and how permanent the regime is.

Romanians will testify that, after Nicolae Ceausescu visited Buckingham Palace in 1978, the public was pointedly shown footage of the dictator getting in and out of gold carriages. The leaders of the international proletariat are surprisingly vain. In the Seventies and Eighties, Ceausescu and the founder of North Korea’s dynasty, Kim Il-sung, exchanged visits, and you can watch their respective newsreels on Youtube. What’s fascinating is that, while the Romanians were keen not to film Ceausescu stuttering or grimacing, as he regularly did, they didn’t edit out what the North Koreans cut from their own movies as a matter of course: Kim Il-sung’s massive goitre. Just look at the faces of the Romanian delegation as they pretend not to notice the tennis-ball sticking out of the side of his neck.

I shouldn’t mock. It risks making me part of the problem, which is that we don’t take this regime seriously enough. Its missiles are still a little too short-range to threaten us; its leaders look too much like Saturday morning cartoons. The media has certainly Disney-fied these Olympics. How else can they persuade us to watch some of the most boring sports ever conceived? By casting Kim Yo-jong as a princess, braving the ice to bring a message of peace to a land that has been at war with her family for generations.

It gets stupider: Mike Pence, the US vice president, is now the stock baddie threatening to tear the Koreas apart. This filthy lie is straight out of the North Korean playbook, and yet the media is practically setting it to music. Pence “cast one of the loneliest figures”, reported Reuters. His crime? He refused to stand up when the jointkorean team entered the stadium.

You have to be morally bankrupt to think Pence and Donald Trump are the villains of the Korean crisis. That would be the Kims, and they’re doing what they’ve done for decades – escalate then talk, escalate then talk, all the while digging themselves in a little deeper, buying the regime time. But God’s got their number. This is a vile, squalid dictatorship that enslaves, tortures and murders its own people and would have collapsed in 1989 were it not so unusually brutal and barbaric. The only hopeful thing you can report on such an evil is that it cannot last forever. The dictators know that. Kim Yo-jong knows that. Some day, she might well be standing in a courtroom, and saying nothing lest she implicate herself.

Until then, it’s the West’s duty to keep the pressure on, and the responsibility of the press to report objectively, yes, but also with common sense. This time, boys, you’ve been played. North Korea takes the gold in shameless propaganda.