North Korea Skips China for Russian Satellite for TV Propaganda
It is a dilemma that the media of totalitarian regimes always face, one day or another: is propaganda used to conquer souls or to please the leaders? Pyongyang seems to have chosen the second option by broadcasting, starting this week, the programs of Choson Chung’ang T’ellebijyon (KCTV), the state television, from a Russian satellite, after having used a Chinese satellite for years, as revealed by the American site specializing in North Korea NK News.
A choice “surprising”, According to researcher Martyn Williams, who runs the specialist blog “North Korea Tech” :
“This change could deprive several billion potential viewers (of KCTV’s programs), because the Russian satellite covers a much smaller area than the Chinese satellite.”
The Korea Times precise than the ChinaSat-12 satellite, which North Korea had been using since 2012, “remains fully operational and still has several years of mission,” according to the South Korean Unification Ministry, which was the first to notice that some South Korean regions were experiencing interruptions in KCTV broadcasts following the change.
A double “signal”
The new Russian satellite u
