Oh, lord. Speaking of Korea, as I did a moment ago, Shin Dong-hyuk, the Great Escapist from north of the DMZ, has retracted parts of his breathless, lapel-grabbing, page-turning book Escape from Camp 14, co-authored with the Washington Post's Blaine Harden. Like, it wasn't Camp 14, but Camp 18. More than a numerical misrepresentation there. Camp 14 is like Devil's Island, it is a DPRK "total control zone." He escaped from there? It turns out he didn't escape from there. And the torture happened later in his life.
Shin became a cause celebre in the West. He met with John Kerry, probably went for a walk with Kerry, and was a key witness before the United Nations to get DPRK leaders charged in the International Criminal Court. Does this hurt that cause? Clearly. The DPRK issued a heated denial of Shin's story, the Post and others followed up and now the DPRK has been proved partly correct. Yeah, that's going to hurt. Why did Shin "embellish?" He had a good story as it was! That question is unanswered tonight.
It is so difficult to fact-check a secret story. Like the Tiananmen Papers, how are you going to fact-check that? Like the University of Virginia non-gang rape which the Post did much to unravel. We are all left with the reporter's or co-author's or publisher's gut feeling about the credibility of the narrator. He or she has looked the person in the eye, observed the body language, that's about all one can do in "escape froms" and those are not substitutes for fact-checking. Sabrina Rubin Erdely could have fact-checked "Jackie's" story but didn't. I do not know what Harden did or did not do before publication of Camp 14 in 2012 but talking to the accused apparently was not one of them. The DPRK didn't issue its denial until last fall.
And like the first-person memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. I have joked that if I ever wrote a book on China it would be a fake of one of those escape froms, like Donkey Baby by that non-existent pumpkin-eater "Sonia J. Song." Jung Chang's Wild Swans popularity demonstrated the endless Western appetite for the genre and there have been gaggles of them. I'd take the name of some guy, preferably dead, place myself somewhere plausible and just run with it. You could fact-check it against the others. That wouldn't be hard at all. Writing the truth meticulously is hard.
Shin became a cause celebre in the West. He met with John Kerry, probably went for a walk with Kerry, and was a key witness before the United Nations to get DPRK leaders charged in the International Criminal Court. Does this hurt that cause? Clearly. The DPRK issued a heated denial of Shin's story, the Post and others followed up and now the DPRK has been proved partly correct. Yeah, that's going to hurt. Why did Shin "embellish?" He had a good story as it was! That question is unanswered tonight.
It is so difficult to fact-check a secret story. Like the Tiananmen Papers, how are you going to fact-check that? Like the University of Virginia non-gang rape which the Post did much to unravel. We are all left with the reporter's or co-author's or publisher's gut feeling about the credibility of the narrator. He or she has looked the person in the eye, observed the body language, that's about all one can do in "escape froms" and those are not substitutes for fact-checking. Sabrina Rubin Erdely could have fact-checked "Jackie's" story but didn't. I do not know what Harden did or did not do before publication of Camp 14 in 2012 but talking to the accused apparently was not one of them. The DPRK didn't issue its denial until last fall.
And like the first-person memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. I have joked that if I ever wrote a book on China it would be a fake of one of those escape froms, like Donkey Baby by that non-existent pumpkin-eater "Sonia J. Song." Jung Chang's Wild Swans popularity demonstrated the endless Western appetite for the genre and there have been gaggles of them. I'd take the name of some guy, preferably dead, place myself somewhere plausible and just run with it. You could fact-check it against the others. That wouldn't be hard at all. Writing the truth meticulously is hard.
