Newstapa 뉴스타파, an independent journalism website, analyzed over 23k articles regarding North Korea published by South Korea’s 22 largest media outlets from April 2020 to March 2021, in order to examine the process by which news about North Korea is produced.
Among them, 1781 articles cited unnamed and unverifiable sources, described variously as “relevant party” 관계자, “relevant official” 당국자 or “informant” 소식통. Approximately half of the articles were reproductions of non-Korean news articles that cited anonymous sources, while the other half were domestically produced articles.
Chosun Ilbo 조선일보, the leading conservative daily, was the most frequent purveyor of news articles citing anonymous sources in its North Korea coverage.