North Korea Report
BBC News - Newsnight - Life inside the North Korean bubble:
North Korean TV only broadcasts hagiographies of the two leaders and pictures celebrating the country’s army, model farms, model villages etc.
Our minders had probably never seen any other kinds of news item or documentary about their country or the rest of the world.
They were not allowed to, and they could not, because no-one has access to the internet in North Korea.
You can see the full episode by Sue Lloyd-Roberts at the BBC. The starvation is shocking (the army had to drop their height requirement because widespread malnourishment meant they had to reject too many applicants), but the extent to which the government controls the population’s access to knowledge has truly unreal consequences. Here is an entire population that does not actually know what they are missing because they have no accurate information about the outside world. That this can go on in 2010 indicates we have not come as far as a world as we think.