S. Korea to permit public access to N. Korea’s main newspaper – The Korea Times

8 comments

1. SS: South Korea’s government announced on Dec 26, 2025, it will reclassify North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun—the ruling Workers’ Party mouthpiece—from “special materials” to “general,” enabling easy public access to print editions next week, though online access remains blocked under national security laws. Backed by dovish President Lee Jae-myung—who decries the ban as infantilizing citizens—and inter-agency consensus, this partial liberalization aims to uphold the “right to know” and foster inter-Korean exchanges amid frozen ties. As Pyongyang’s provocations persist, does this gesture signal Seoul’s unilateral confidence-building to thaw relations and counter information asymmetry, or risk domestic exposure to regime propaganda in a divided peninsula where psychological warfare remains a core deterrent?

2. This is a wild move that I can only see increasing sympathies towards the north. I don’t understand the logic here at all. A thawing of ties is not on the horizon and this isn’t going to speed that process so I really don’t understand what the South gains from this.

3. Even Kim Jong-Un is prob confused by this.

   You’re basically mainlining propaganda from an enemy to your people.

   It’s like letting ISIS have a channel on tv

4. Every time we have a president from the democratic party (the liberal one of the effectively bipartisan system), they try to kick off a detente of inter-Korean relations by unilaterally making offers like these. During the Moon administration they called it the “driver’s seat” approach, in that the South will lead NK efforts (whether it be economic, political, or nuclear) and sent special envoys to Moscow, Washington, Beijing, and Tokyo right away. This one is particularly interesting because unlike previous attempts it actually doesn’t benefit the Kim regime directly, and wasn’t really something that had been at the top of the agenda in the discourse within the South either.

   I am not going to comment on if that is beneficial to the South or if it has been effective so far since that is inherently and unavoidably a political statement in Korea.

5. The only benefit I can think of is that now North Korea will have to consider that people in South Korea will also be reading the publication when they write their propaganda. It will be interesting to see how or if they choose to change the content based on that.

6. Allowing extremely antagonist foreign propaganda to run in your country is an interesting strategy.

7. If North Korea is smart they won’t publish ridiculous things and just truths.

   1. Pust about bad things Trump does.

   2. Encourage existing friction between Korea and Japan.

   3. Some real grievances the people have (I’m not korean so I don’t know what)

8. The only reasoning I can think of for why South Korea would do this unilateral goodwill gesture is because they are so confident that no one in the South will pay attention to the North’s archaic propaganda that it costs the South nothing. Realistically, the South Korean youth are not going to choose to spend their time consuming North Korean media when they could instead be watching TikTok, YouTube, anime, gaming, etc. North Korean media offers nothing but an outdated economic ideology and an increasingly out-of-place racial-purity ideology for the cosmopolitan South.

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