BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. A catastrophic explosion rocked the North Korean town of Ryongchon Thursday. The first reports out of South Korea said the accident had claimed 3,000 lives. The reports had to come from South Korea, because as of Friday morning, the North Koreans had yet to acknowledge the incident at all. By Friday afternoon, according to diplomatic sources, the death toll stood in the hundreds with many more seriously injured, but even those numbers are in doubt. Forty-eight hours after the explosion, state television in North Korea still had not reported the disaster, concentrating instead on the visit by the country's leader, Kim Jong Il, to China. This program has often documented the difficulty of conducting journalism in a repressive society. In a closed society, it is next to impossible. Rebecca McKinnon spent years attempting the impossible. She's now a fellow at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy, and she joins me now. Rebecca, welcome.

REBECCA McKINNON: Thank you very much.

BOB GARFIELD: After this explosion, the North Korean government not only did not acknowledge that it had taken place, but shut down international phone service, closed the border to China which is only 12 miles away from the accident scene, and took other fairly typical measures for that society to suppress the news. You've been a reporter covering North Korea. How do you go about trying to find out what's going on and then getting information out of that extremely closed society?

REBECCA McKINNON: Well, it's very tough, because no Western news agencies or news organizations have bureaus in North Korea. Since really 2002, the North Koreans haven't been allowing American journalists in there at all, so if your news organization has an office in Beijing, you're calling people on the border who might have relatives on the other side who might know something about what's going on, or you might be relying on the South Korean press reports and South Korean journalists, and being ethnic Korean, they have a bit more access to information over on the other side, because they employ North Korean defectors and so forth. But when you do get this information, it's almost impossible to confirm definitively with anybody inside North Korea, so it's extremely frustrating that the bulk of reporting about North Korea is all secondhand.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:You mentioned the cultivation of defectors from the North to the South. I gather that's a sort of cottage industry within the media in South Korea.

REBECCA McKINNON: It is, to a certain extent, definitely. All the major newspapers in South Korea employ people who had originally been from North Korea, because they're as close to an expert that anybody can get to, since they're not able to go across the border and have a frank interview with anybody directly.

BOB GARFIELD:Is there any way to know whether reporting that has taken place in the past about North Korea, through this method, is even accurate -- to figure out whether the exercise of this kind of whisper down the lane is really serving the public?

REBECCA McKINNON: That's a really good question. For instance, when it came to the famine in North Korea in the mid-90s, there's still tremendous dispute about how many people actually starved to death during that time. The numbers go from several million all the way down to a few thousand, depending on who you ask. Also, a lot of people in South Korea have been questioning reports in the U.S. media that are coming from CIA sources about the state of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, and they say well, you know, the CIA leaked something to the New York Times, and the New York Times reported it, but we can't confirm it independently, so therefore, why is everybody assuming it's true. You hear that a lot in South Korea. And defectors coming out of North Korea with stories about horrible human rights abuses, and while it's well-documented that North Korea has an extremely serious human rights problem, there are people who questioned, well where did that person get the information, and can you prove it, and it becomes very hard to prove specific things that went on in North Korea.

BOB GARFIELD:People who do all the big thinking about regimes like the Kim Jong Il regime in North Korea often mention how external events can sometimes cause an opening that the ordinary course of politics cannot. Is there a chance that this devastating accident could open some channels of communication that hitherto had not existed?

REBECCA McKINNON: Well, that is definitely a hope, and this is a real test to see to what extent North Korea values control of information versus helping its own citizens, and if controlling information and controlling access to their country is so important that it takes precedence over saving the lives of potentially hundreds of people, that definitely says something about the regime. Or, if the regime decides that it is willing to accept the help, but is it willing to risk having foreigners see things that maybe are not entirely positive about North Korea in order to help people there -- then that would say that they might be more serious about opening up their country so that their people can be helped and pulled out of poverty as well.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, Rebecca, thank you very much.

REBECCA McKINNON: You're welcome.

BOB GARFIELD:Rebecca McKinnon spent years attempting the impossible for CNN. She is now a fellow at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy. [MUSIC]