Jang Song Thaek, the uncle of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, was reportedly “stripped naked” and fed to a pack of starving dogs, but according to another report on Monday, htat might satire
Reuters on Monday said that the story “likely came from satire” originating from a Chinese microblogging website.
The story was picked up by a Hong Kong-based newspaper, suggesting that Kim’s rule is more brutal than his father’s. Jang was labeled as a “traitor” but it was initially reported that he was likely killed by firing squad.
A post on the Tencent Weibo said Jang and five of his aides were killed by dogs. The post was viewed nearly 300,000 times. The Wen Wei Po newspaper then picked it up and it was reported on by international media outlets.
Trevor Powell, a Chicago-based blogger, wrote that there‘s “still all missing the obvious fact that the original source of the Wen Wei Po story was a tweet from a known satirist or someone posing as him/her.”
“It’s amusing that given our faith in modern global news media to get to the bottom of a story, no one has actually gone back to the Wen Wei Po article and caught this. All analysis in the swaths of content that have been devoted to this report since it came out stops abruptly at a linguistic wall between the English language Straits Times story and the Chinese language Wen Wei Po article,” he wrote.
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