Evan Osnos discusses the risks he took on by travelling to North Korea to report on Kim Jong Un and the prospect of nuclear war.
How does a news organization decide if a place is safe to travel? At The New Yorker, we asked ourselves that question a lot as I tried to gain access to North Korea, in order to report a story about Kim Jong Un and the prospect of nuclear war. In August, two weeks before I was set to depart, the State Department strongly warned against travel to North Korea and announced that, except in special cases, it would ban Americans from making the trip after September 1st. Ignoring these official notices would be a kind of malpractice, but news organizations have to balance this concern against the public service that they may provide by gaining understanding of national-security problems.
For foreign correspondents, this is a recurring puzzle: every country and every crisis offers a different answer.
