Reading the Dictators’ Newspapers
Everybody’s got their favorite newspaper or magazine—the one they turn to first thing in the morning, breakfast fork in hand, for a look at what’s going on in the world. Noam Chomsky, famously, prefers the Financial Times, calling it “more open, more free, often more critical” because it’s where the rich and powerful speak frankly to one another. Joan Didion praised the Berkeley Barb, the Open City, and the other “underground” papers of 1960s California as among “the only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire.” Your own periodicals of choice might be the Detroit Free Press or Drop Site News, or if you have especially good taste, Current Affairs. But there are some papers I read regularly that are a little different from those. Almost nobody else in the United States reads them, but I think they tell us some important things about our country and the world, though probably not in the way their writers intend. You see, I’m a loyal reader of the Pyongyang Times and the Tehran Times.