The Missile that Wasn't.

• Author: MESLER, BILL
• Position: U.S. media's coverage of North Korea's rocket launch - Abstract

Misleading stories about North Korea fuel danger

On August 31, the State Department announced, without trace of doubt, that North Korea had launched a Taepo Dong-1 ballistic missile. It was an ominous report, and it heated up the growing rhetoric in Washington against the 1994 accord that had suspended that country's nuclear weapons program. Though the North Koreans insisted they had launched a satellite and not a missile, papers throughout the United States portrayed the North Korean claim as a kind of sinister footnote, an obviously pathological lie. Time magazine ran a story entitled Missile With a Message, which asserted flatly that "the Stalinist state has a dangerous new toy ... the Taepo Dong-1."

The day after the Time story appeared, the Pentagon ate crow and admitted the North Koreans had launched not a missile but a rocket carrying a satellite. The admission made for a big story in the Asian press. The Australian Financial Review described it as "embarrassing" and "much to the chagrin of America."

But in the United States, the Pentagon's reversal received far less attention than the original, misleading stories. While international papers correctly began referring to the "North Korean rocket," American papers almost uniformly called it a "missile carrying a satellite"--a far less accurate but much more menacing description.

No media outlet stood more intransigent than Business Week. A full six days after the Pentagon's admission, the magazine ran the story North Korea Plays a Scary Game of Chicken. The piece discussed, as if it were fact, North Korea's "firing of a missile over Japan." Making no reference to the Pentagon's statement, the story dismissed the question of whether the "missile [was] simply a satellite ... as the North Koreans insist."

The missile fiasco was the second time in two weeks the media had screwed up a major story on North Korea. The first was the "secret nuclear complex" supposedly exposed in a New York Times piece on August 17.

In early August, according to one State Department official I talked to, the Republicans leaked misleading intelligence information to The New York Times concerning a major North Korean construction project in Yong Byon. The subsequent story in The New York Times then quoted "unnamed intelligence analysts" who described thousands of North Korean workers "swarming" and "burrowing" into a mountain to build "a huge secret underground [nuclear] complex."

The complex seemed to grow more...