Most US reporting and writing about North Korea is saturated with intellectual frivolity. In the murky waters of North Korea reporting, journalists and writers have been flouting fact-checking and common sense in favor of self-dealing and careerism.

In his now-discredited best seller of 2013, Escape from Camp 14, American journalist Blaine Harden devoted an entire page to the tale of how North Korean defector Shin Dong-hyuk had to crawl over the body of a friend electrocuted on a high-voltage fence to escape Camp 14, the country’s most notorious gulag. Harden did not explain how Shin himself was not instantly electrocuted in this scenario. However, Shin was a petty criminal, not a political prisoner, and could not have escaped Camp 14 because he has never been jailed there.

In another best seller on North Korea, Without You, There is No Us, Korean-American author Suki Kim depicted herself as an investigative journalist who went undercover as an English teacher at a Pyongyang college to study the lives of the North Korean elite’s youth. But she was never as incognito as she claimed.