An unexpected voice of authority
Somewhere north of the 38th parallel, the earth trembled unexpectedly on Sunday. Then came the booming declaration from a North Korean grandmother in a pink traditional robe.
Ri Chun Hee, North Korea’s most famous news anchor, announced on state television that the country’s sixth nuclear detonation had gone off without a hitch.
“The test of a hydrogen bomb designed to be mounted on our intercontinental ballistic missile was a perfect success,” Ri thundered, grinning and seated before an ethereal painting of a lake. “It was a very meaningful step in completing the national nuclear weapons program.”
Ri, 74, has been described as the “voice of North Korea” and “the people’s broadcaster,” a sort of Barbara Walters of the reclusive dictatorship. For more than 40 years, she has been the most celebrated news reader on the country’s lone news outlet, Korean Central Television. Her affinity for bright pink Choson-ots, traditional Korean formal dresses, has earned her the title of “pink lady.”
Some outsiders used to joke about her. They called her “Pyongyang Patti,” according to the Atlantic. Or they would use her as a foil to ridicule, for example, Sean Spicer (“He is just missing a robe,” one Twitter user said.)
“She has a very aggressive voice, one that North Koreans would say ‘fills up the screen,’ ” Kim Yong, a defector from the North who became a media personality in South Korea, told Reuters in a 2009 profile. “Listening to South Korean newscasters when I first arrived sounded like hearing mom and dad talk in their room. The newscasters sometimes stumbled on words, while the ones in North Korea are never allowed to, or they’ll get fired.”
Details about Ri’s life and career are sparse, but she was reportedly born in 1943 to a poor family in what is now the southeastern part of the country and attended theatre school in Pyongyang.
The North Korean state-run magazine Chosun Monthly gave an apocryphal account in 2009 of how she became something of a protege of Kim Il Sung, the state founder. Kim pushed her “with warm love and faith” to develop an authoritative voice, according to the story, which was translated by Reuters.
“As these days passed, her voice grew to have an appeal so that whenever she would speak on the news, viewers were touched,” the article read, according to the Reuters translation. “When Ri announced reports and statements, enemies would tremble in fear.”
Ri joined state television in1971, just as it was beginning to take shape. By the 1980s, she was a “constant presence,” reading reports on everything from national events to government proclamations to the weather, according to the blog North Korea Leadership Watch.
In 1994, she tearfully broke the news that Kim Il Sung had died. Seventeen years later, she wept again when she told the country that his son, Kim Jong Il, had died of a “sudden illness.”
It is perhaps the most famous moment in her storied career. A news clip shows Ri dressed in a black robe and looking forlorn, seated in front of a painting of a forest and mountain landscape. Her voice quavers as she delivers the news.
“Our great comrade Kim Jong Il, the general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the chairman of the DPRK National Defense Commission and the supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army, has passed away,” she intones.
She retired from the news business in 2012, but Ri is still the regime’s go-to announcer for earth-shattering announcements such as Sunday’s nuclear test. If hostilities were to erupt on the Korean Peninsula, it would almost certainly be her commanding voice that relays the news.
“It is the very top-level announcements, the ones that North Korea feels particularly proud of and have maximum propaganda value,” Martyn Williams, a writer for a North Korean Tech website, told the Los Angeles Times last month. “She’s the one that goes out and tells the nation and the world.”