So the story that Jong-un is in a coma is blowing up, and a basically identical story blew up several months ago, both times it was also reported how Kim Yo Jong took over.

This time it’s coming from especially bad sources like NY Post, and other similar places.

Bigger and more credible news outlets aren’t reporting the coma story right now, but they’ve been reporting that Kim Yo Jong has been getting more power delegated to her and all kinds of profiles about her.

Anyone has a clue what’s going on with this whole thing?

I have a feeling like there’s some truth to Jong-un’s poor health, and that this is some kind of effort to sabotage Kim Yo Jong as his successor or something.

Like, constantly reporting on her “growing influence” and how she “takes power” after Jong-un is incapacitated makes me feel like it’s done in a way to make her look power-hungry and opportunistic or something and maybe hurt her standing with NK leadership.

I don’t know if that makes sense honestly, cause why would anyone inside NK care what some news outlets in the west were saying, but I don’t know what else could be the reason for this many stories about this topic – maybe just pure clickbait bullshit with no agenda? IDK

  • RandomSovietKid
    8·
    4 years ago

    (Disclaimer that all that I’ll say is speculation, I can’t know for sure.)

    I looked at that “NY Post” site, seems like a typical tabloid to me. It’s probably indeed just clickbait for the advertising revenue (see here for all the scripts I see on the NY Post page, many of which seem to be for advertising).

    I’ve seen the claim from a Twitter account (don’t remember which one, sorry) that many westerners have taken interest in Kim Yo Jong. So, there is a “demand”, and the tabloid gives them the stories they want.

    The story from some months ago, however, was reported by more serious outlets. The reason may be may be what @ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml or @pimento@lemmygrad.ml said below. My other suspicion is that it was some kind of distraction manoever. If westerners are talking about Kim Jong Un’s alleged death, they’re not talking about their own countries’ bad response to COVID-19. My connection to the Internet Archive is terribly slow, so I can’t analyze the coverage, but according to this analysis:

    On Twitter, the hashtag #KimJongunDead went viral as well, and millions of users swallowed the fake news whole.

    Next, a photoshopped picture went viral on social media purporting to show Kim dead in a glass coffin.

    So if this was a distraction manoever, it clearly had some success.

    I doubt that the Supreme Leader has any serious health problems. He has been guiding some conference every week recently. I don’t think he could do that if he had some serious health problems.

    In the story from some months ago, the rumours of his death or coma were backed by the fact that he hadn’t showed up on camera for a month or so. But his absence could have been for any other reason. Maybe he indeed was recovering his health. Maybe he just wanted to avoid large gatherings as a precaution. Maybe he just had more important work to do than the visits and guidances. We can’t know. But we know for fact that he returned later.

    Considering the other stories that western “news” outlets have reported about the DPRK, I don’t think anyone in the DPRK government is going to take these reports seriously.

    I haven’t seen recent reports about Yo Jong’s “growing influence” yet. Could you give me a link so I can analyze further?