Table tennis champions said to be in ‘cleanse from exposure to contamination’ following podium picture with opponents

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/40456691

It was a heartwarming moment that captured the Olympic spirit, but North Korea’s table tennis champions may be punished for joining a selfie with their opponents from the South.

Ri Jong Sik and Kim Kum Yong, who won silver medals, are said to be undergoing “ideological evaluation” along with other athletes who returned from the Paris Games.

The assessment is a standard procedure to “cleanse” the team from “exposure to contamination” abroad, the Daily NK reported.

North Korean athletes were reportedly given “special instructions” not to interact with South Koreans or other foreign athletes in Paris, under threat of repercussions.

Since returning from France, the Olympic team is believed to be in the process of a three-stage ideological assessment process by the country’s ministry of sport.

It is said to last about a month, with the intention of purging any lingering influence of “non-socialist” culture.

  • JohnBrownII@lemmy.worldEnglish
    209·
    4 months ago

    Not a single source that didn’t link back to the telegraph. Is this seriously the standard for journalism today?

    “America interrogates its citizens after traveling abroad” source: Me, I said it

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          112·
          4 months ago

          I’m gonna guess that there’s a lot of potential legal and security hurdles to linking to anything hosted in North Korea. Or maybe NK Daily os only available in Korean and as such linking to the article would be useless as far as moth of the Telegraph’s readership goes 🤷

          Not defending that conservative rag in general, mind you, just pointing out the specific difficulties…

    • theluddite@lemmy.mlEnglish
      54·
      4 months ago

      Journalists actually have very weird and, I would argue, self-serving standards about linking. Let me copy paste from an email that I got from a journalist when I emailed them about relying on my work but not actually citing it:

      I didn’t link directly to your article because I wasn’t able to back up some of the claims made independently, which is pretty standard journalistic practice

      In my opinion, this is a clever way to legitimize passing off research as your own, which is definitely what they did, up to and including repeating some very minor errors that I made.

      I feel similarly about journalistic ethics for not paying sources. That’s a great way to make sure that all your sources are think tank funded people who are paid to have opinions that align with their funding, which is exactly what happens. I understand that paying people would introduce challenges, but that’s a normal challenge that the rest of us have to deal with every fucking time we hire someone. Journalists love to act like people coming forth claiming that they can do X or tell them about Y is some unique problem that they face, when in reality it’s just what every single hiring process exists to sort out.