Econintersect: According to the Huffington Post, our Video of the Day on North Korea is a fake.
The video, titled “How Americans Live Today,” features an English voiceover purportedly translating the original Korean narration. The phony translation describes hyperbolic scenes of Americans being forced to live in tents and eating melted snow in order to survive. The man behind the farce? British travel writer Alun Hill, who doesn’t speak a word of Korean.
This video has gone viral and been featured on Mediaite, Wired, BuzzFeed, The Week, Slate, The Daily Caller, Yahoo, Telegraph and The Washington Post – with none realizing it was a fake.
Hill told The Huffington Post over the phone Wednesday that he received the original video from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, which said it depicts the failure of European democracy.
Although Econintersect had “fact checked” this video, we did take this video directly off of the author’s YouTube video page and was clearly labelled “comedy”.