The Media Research Center’s Clay Waters complained in a June 25 post:
It takes gall to go after a North Korean defector, and on the front page of the New York Times, no less. The paper’s staff writer Charles Homans’ odd choice of target appeared in the Friday edition under the rather tasteless headline, “Yeonmi Park, a North Korean Dissident, Defects to the American Right.”
Although the Times has in the past been notably soft on North Korea’s Communist dictatorship, one could hardly imagine the paper straining so hard to cast doubt on a defector who suffered greatly under the regime, just for the crime of supporting conservative policy and comparing the American left to the dictatorship she escaped.
Waters went on to whine that “The Times can’t forgive her for turning on the intolerant American left” and that “Homans ran into overtime nit-picking Park’s story,” adding: “It seems only escapees from left-wing regimes have to endure this doubt about how bad things really were.”
As we noted the last time the MRC hyped Park, questions about her story have been made for years — something Park made easy to check by having a record of telling markedly different stories about her life on South Korean TV. But even as he listed some of those inconsistencies, Waters made no effort to rebut them — he simply complains that they were pointed out, which gave him a chance to baselessly frame it as a political attack.
A few weeks later, the Washington Post published an article pointing out even more inconsistencies in Park’s stories, offering further evidence that she seems to be telling stories that cater to the preconceived notions of right-wing audiences. Interestingly, both Waters and the rest of the MRC were completely silent about it — perhaps a concession that they know they can’t defend her.