North Korea’s state-run media still hasn’t broken the news to the nation that Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency last week, a BBC News employee tasked with monitoring state media reports from around the world said on his Twitter, the Independent newspaper reported Monday.
“It’s now Monday in North Korea, and the state media still seem not to have told the population the result of the US presidential election,” Chris Greenway wrote on Sunday morning.
Mr. Greenway, who, according to his Twitter profile bio, has been “[w]atching (and listening to) the world from BBC Monitoring since 1981,” says that by contrast it took Pyongyang three days to tell its citizens that Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008.
On its website, BBC Monitoring describes its mission as “translat[ing] and analy[zing] news and information from freely available media sources around the world.”
North Korea’s literal radio silence on the news may be particularly puzzling as back in June an editorial by state-run media suggested a Trump presidency would be welcomed by the regime.
“North Korean state media have hailed US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as a ’wise politician’ who could be good for the North,” the BBC reported at the time, regarding the DPRK Today editorial hailing Mr. Trump as a “far-sighted presidential candidate.”
“Analysts said the editorial was not official policy but probably reflected Pyongyang’s thinking,” the BBC said.
On Nov. 8, this newspaper reported North Korea was likely planning a ballistic missile test to coincide with its announcing the winner of the U.S. election.
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