From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

A catastrophic explosion rocked the North Korean town of Rung Chan 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.

Thank you very much. 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 close society?

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

...