North Korea is having a party... well not really but they'd like you to believe that. They're holding the seventh party congress and for reasons unknown to anyone but them have invited the worlds press to report on and view the spectacle. But, really how much reporting can one do with a media minder handcuffed to you 24 hours a day? Maybe they'll you ride the subway for more than two stops? Probably not as state secrets might be relieved like how many steps one has to climb just to exit the place. Or, just how many pictures there are of the Kim family. Wouldn't want anyone to that.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is preparing for the biggest political event of his career – a once-in-a-generation coming together of the Korean Workers’ Party, an institution described as the “backbone of the state”.
As with other events of great national pride – like the annual Pyongyang marathon, or any basketball game associated with Dennis Rodman – 130 international journalistshave been invited to report on the spectacle otherwise know as the seventh party congress.
But while the regime seems happy to allow a foreign tourism industry to operate and to grant visas to the occasional overseas student, journalists asking questions about the numbers held in prison camps or interviewing ordinary North Koreans is not an option.
Anna Fifield
My North Korean minder just gave me a "reporter" armband - as if I might go unnoticed through Pyongyang without it
Talking about the challenges of reporting from North Korea, The Washington Post’s Anna Fifield has previously written of the “thrill” of getting “an elusive visa.... yet so maddening when you realise that you’re moving through a kind of real-life Truman Show.”
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