The front page of today's New York Times carries a photograph of President Bush and a Japanese man. The cutline under the photo says, "President Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan appeared together at a news conference in Tokyo yesterday." The photograph, however, shows not Prime Minister Koizumi but rather Emperor Akihito.
The Japanese can at least rest assured that they are not the only ones that get this sort of treatment from the Times; a photo of public-relations man Howard Rubenstein was labeled on the front of the Times metro section the other day as one of real-estate mogul Larry Silverstein. The Rubenstein-Silverstein error was corrected the next day, as the Koizumi-Akihito error will no doubt also be corrected, but the real question is why the Times, with its vast resources and hundreds of highly paid, college-educated editors, can't devise some sort of system to catch these errors before they get into the newspaper.
Excellent Value: One of the most disgusting examples of so-called journalism ever to soil the pages of the New York Times appears today on the front of the paper's business section. It is a dispatch from North Korea that runs under the headline, "Tentatively, North Korea Solicits Foreign Investment and Tourism." It includes, basically unchallenged, the statement from a British member of the European Parliament that "At the moment, very cheap labor is the only thing the North Koreans have going for them." It also includes, totally unchallenged, a quote from the president of the Korea Society in New York that says, "There are over 125 South Korean firms doing business in North Korea. They find it difficult to get through the bureaucracy. Once they do, they find the North Korean workers literate, hard workers and excellent value."
This is tantamount to the Times showing up in the antebellum American South or in the gulag during the days of the Soviet Union and quoting experts there about the "cheap labor," "hard workers and excellent value." The reason the workers there are so cheap and the "value" so excellent is that they are trapped in the country by Communist soldiers who will shoot them dead if they try to escape to freedom. In addition, anyone who tries to organize a free labor union -- that is, one independent of the state -- will also be shot dead. There are no real collective bargaining rights in North Korea. Had the Times bothered to call up a real human rights group like Freedom House or a real labor federation like the AFL-CIO, the newspaper might have avoided itself some of this embarrassment.
Or the Times could have checked the most recent State Department human rights report, which states that in North Korea, "Nongovernmental labor unions do not exist. . . . unions function on the classic 'Stalinist model,' with responsibility for mobilizing workers behind production goals and for providing health, education, cultural, and welfare facilities. Unions do not have the right to strike. . . . Workers have no right to organize or to bargain collectively. Government ministries set wages. The State assigns all jobs. Ideological purity is as important as professional competence in deciding who receives a particular job, and foreign companies that have established joint ventures report that all their employees must be hired from lists submitted by the Korean Workers' Party. The Constitution states that all working-age citizens must work and 'strictly observe labor discipline and working hours.' The Penal Code states that anyone who hampers the nation's industry, commerce, or transportation by intentionally failing to carry out a specific assignment 'while pretending to be functioning normally' is subject to the death penalty; it also states that anyone who 'shoddily carries out' an assigned duty is subject to no less than 5 years' imprisonment. Even persistent tardiness may be defined as 'anti-Socialist wrecking' under these articles, although as a result of food shortages absenteeism reportedly has become widespread as more time must be spent finding food." The State Department human rights report notes that a North Korean official "described the labor force to an audience of foreign business executives by noting that 'there are no riots, no strikes, and no differences of opinion' with management."
"Excellent value," indeed.