SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — For two hours every day, Lee Si-young and her colleagues broadcast uncensored foreign news into authoritarian North Korea. Her radio audience could go to jail if caught listening.
Lee's Seoul-based Free North Korea Radio station has tried for two decades to give real-time news to North Korea's 26 million people. But Lee says she now feels a sense of crisis about her work as big government-funded broadcasters in the United
States and South Korea have fallen silent this year because of major funding cuts and policy changes.
“Our frustrations with the U.S. and South Korean governments are growing over their suspensions of radio broadcasts," said Lee, a defector who heads the small, nongovernmental FNK radio station. "We're afraid that they've abandoned North Korean residents.”
In North Korea, all radio and TV sets are fixed to state-run channels.
But defectors have testified that they modified their radios or used smuggled ones to covertly tune in to foreign broadcasts at night for news their government didn't want them to hear. That includes outside perspectives of the North's ruling Kim dynasty, more affluent and freer Western lifestyles, and success stories about defectors.
But a respected academic website focused on North Korea, 38 North, assessed last month that such outside radio broadcasting toward North Korea was down by 85% after cuts made by the U.S. and South Korean governments.
Two major U.S.-funded broadcasters — the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia — were forced to stop their Korean-language radio broadcasts after U.S. President Donald Trump in March signed an executive order effectively dismantling the agency that oversaw or provided funding to media networks. Trump said the networks had a liberal bias or were wasteful.
South Korea's liberal government led by President Lee Jae Myung halted cross-border radio broadcasts in an attempt to lower animosities with North Korea. His government also turned off frontline loudspeakers blaring K-pop songs and world news, and banned activists from flying balloons with propaganda leaflets and USB sticks across the border.
The FNK station is now one of several small civil or religious organizations that still transmit radio broadcasts into North Korea. Lee, the FNK head, said that VOA and RFA were much bigger than her group, which has only five workers, all defectors from North Korea.
“We feel heavy-hearted and have a conflict over whether we should tell North Koreans that those suspended broadcasts were paused only temporarily and they would definitely be restarted or that we're the only one of the few who survived,” she said.
Despite setbacks in efforts to spread outside news in North Korea, Lee Young-hyeon, a defector-turned-lawyer in South Korea, this month launched a website and a mobile app meant to provide North Koreans with an alternative way to get outside information.
Lee said his Korea Internet Studio would first target tens of thousands of North Koreans living abroad, including laborers, students, diplomats and their family members. Many of these North Koreans abroad use mobile phones with access to the global internet, a privilege citizens in the North don't have.
Lee said his group aims to produce practical content that North Koreans abroad could use, such as how students can get better credits at foreign schools, what gifts laborers can buy for their loved ones at home and what cryptocurrency is.
“We don't expect the public using our content to launch an uprising and topple the North Korean government,” Lee said. The objective, he said, is for North Koreans to "learn there is such a good world where they can enjoy some freedom and rights.”
Lee said he thinks North Korea will eventually ease its strict restrictions on the internet in a limited manner as it could allow Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese and other foreign companies to open local offices in the North.
Many observers are skeptical, though.
Since 2020, North Korea has enacted highly oppressive laws to toughen its fight against foreign cultural influences, especially South Korea's. The Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law reportedly imposes up to 10 years of imprisonment with hard labor on those who consume, possess or spread foreign movies and music, and up to five years on those who use unauthorized radio and TV channels.
Some question whether campaigns to provide outside news to North Korea have made a difference. Launches of propaganda balloons and loudspeaker broadcasts have also been a major source of tension with North Korea.
In July, South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young called radio and loudspeaker broadcasts “a relic of the Cold War" and expressed hope that their suspension would improve ties with North Korea. In response to questions posed by The Associated Press, the South Korean Defense Ministry said the suspension of its “Voice of Freedom” radio broadcast was designed to ease military tensions with North Korea.
South Korean officials say North Korea has also switched off its own border loudspeakers and stopped transmitting jamming signals targeting South Korean radio broadcasts. But North Korea is still refusing to resume long-dormant talks with South Korea and the U.S.
Before his defection in 2003, Paek Yosep said he was shocked when South Korean radio broadcasts reported about anti-government protests in Seoul, something that is unthinkable in North Korea. Paek said when he served as a soldier at a frontline unit, he enjoyed listening to music blared from South Korean loudspeakers across the border.
Kim Ki-sung at the FNK station said that the South Korean radio broadcasts he listened to for a decade before he fled North Korea in 1999 influenced his defection. He said he learned that South Korea was rich enough to grant loans to the Soviet Union and that it had so many cars there were traffic jams.
“I'm not sure how strongly addictive drugs are but I think those broadcasts were the same,” Kim said. “Many ask us whether we've confirmed that people in North Korea are truly listening to our programs. But I believe we should keep doing this even if just one person listens to our broadcasts.”
