Every two years, Americans unite around the television to root for U.S. athletes and their dreams of gold medals come true. Unless you’re a journalist. Then the Olympics are a time to root against your country and her president on the world stage.
At the opening ceremonies in Pyeongchang, South Korea, organizers strangely seated Vice President Mike Pence just a few feet from Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korea’s communist dictator Kim Jong-un. To American reporters who hate Trump, a star was born. Just the summaries on Twitter were enough to make you throw your phone across the room.
Start with the wire services. The Associated Press gushed: “The trip by Kim Yo-jong is the latest move in an extraordinary show of Olympic diplomacy with Seoul that could prove to be a major challenge to the Trump administration's hard-line Korea policies.” Reuters echoed: “North Korea has emerged as the early favorite to grab one of the Winter Olympics’ most important medals: the diplomatic gold.”
Could the North Koreans be any happier at the idiocy of the Western media?
The newspapers also claimed Mike Pence lost to the woman who serves as the North Korean deputy director of propaganda. The New York Times headline was “Kim Jong-un’s Sister Turns on the Charm, Taking Pence’s Spotlight.” They turned to Asian history professor Alexis Dudden for the slam dunk: “The fact that he and Mrs. Pence didn’t stand when the unified [Korean] team came in was a new low in a bullying type of American diplomacy.”
The Washington Post front page on Sunday declared they had found the “Ivanka Trump of North Korea.” She “has enraptured people in looks-obsessed South Korea with her sphinxlike smile and low-key beauty.” The story inside added her attendance at the Olympics was “a signal that North Korea is not this crazy, weird former Cold War state -- but it too has young women that are capable and are the future leadership.’”
This kind of truth-shredding article makes a mockery of all the Post’s indignant “Democracy Dies in Darkness” bravado. One might forget that when last May Trump called the North Korean dictator a “pretty smart cookie,” the Post ran a story headlined “Praise for strongmen alarms rights advocates: Trump's vocal affection for totalitarians marks major U.S. policy shift."
The the most embarrassing coverage was delivered by CNN.com, which announced “Kim Jong Un's sister is stealing the show at the Winter Olympics.” The article began, “If ‘diplomatic dance’ were an event at the Winter Olympics, Kim Jong Un's younger sister would be favored to win gold.”
That was in addition to another piece where CNN.com ran the headline touting: “North Korea is winning the Olympics -- and it's not because of sports.” They insisted, without the slightest hint of irony or introspection, that “the North has gotten the kind of publicity money can't buy.”
CNN also brought its academic expert. David Maxwell of Georgetown University proclaimed the communists were “masterful at getting something for nothing. They're going to get recognition, legitimacy, resources, without giving anything up."
This is a complete flip-flop from last May. When Trump called the North Korean tyrant a "pretty smart cookie," CNN anchor Jake Tapper punched back with the brutal facts: "Kim Jong-un had his uncle murdered. That doesn't make Kim Jong-un a smart cookie. That makes him a murderer.”
If our media elite truly revered democracy and loathed totalitarianism, none of this sugar-coated nonsense on North Korean “mastery” would have been uttered or published. Their bitter hatred of the Trump-Pence ticket colors everything they say and write.
