The US and South Korean governments have halted the operations of media organizations that were broadcasting into North Korea, leaving tens of thousands of residents of the world's most isolated country in the dark about what is happening in the outside world.

"This is very bad for the people of North Korea and a really serious setback for human rights there," said Kim Eu-jin, who fled the North with her mother and sister in the 1990s.

"The governments are denying the people of North Korea the freedom to access information and now all they will hear is Pyongyang's propaganda," she told DW.

Previously, North Koreans could surreptitiously tune in to Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Voice of America (VOA) from the US, as well as South Korea's "Voice of Freedom" broadcasts. Activists have said the broadcasts helped North Koreans endure hardship by allowing them to hear things the regime does not want them to know.

Kim said she never listened to foreign radio broadcasts before she defected because it was simply too dangerous to do so. The regime in Pyongyang was willing to to invest a lot of time and effort in catching and punishing people who accessed foreign media. In some cases, those caught would be tried publicly and sentenced to hard labor or, in some extreme cases, to death.

Kim said that the North Korean government fears those broadcasts, and warned that dangers for those who listen to foreign media have become significantly more serious in recent years.

Why were the broadcasts stopped?

Voice of America has been silenced effectively since Donald Trump returned to the White House earlier this year. The new administration quickly fired hundreds of staff and issued an executive order to eliminate VOA's and Radio Free Asia's parent agency, the US Agency for Global Media.

In late August, the South Korean government announced that it was halting broadcasts of Voice of Freedom into the North after 15 years.

Huge loudspeaker systems on the border that had blasted news and South Korean pop music into the North have also been dismantled.

The South Korean government said it was trying to reduce tensions with the North and expressed hope that the regime in Pyongyang might, in turn, be willing to reopen negotiations with the South. There have been no indications to date that the North is contemplating resuming talks with Seoul.

Radio Free Asia goes 'dark'

On October 29, a message from Rosa Hwang, executive editor of Radio Free Asia, stated her broadcaster was halting work due to "uncertain funding" — for the first time in RFA's 29-year history.

"The newsroom is dark. The microphones are off. Broadcasts have been silenced. Publishing is paused. On social media. On our websites."

"Without RFA Korean, 26 million North Koreans isolated by the repressive regime's war on free speech and a free press will lack a critical link to independent information," she said, pointing to the broadcaster's award-winning coverage of the plight of North Korean defectors.

In October, the 38 North website, which analyzes North Korean affairs, held an event to explore the impact of the radio and television beamed into the North.

It showed that anti-regime radio broadcasts are down by 85% and television programming has disappeared entirely since the US and South Korean governments' cuts.

And while it is difficult to determine just how many people the broadcasts were reaching, the analysts emphasized again that the "significant effort and resources spent by the North Korean regime to block them provides some indication of their penetration."

The North has become more adept at jamming broadcasts and the coronavirus pandemic made it harder to smuggle USB sticks and memory cards into the country.

However, enhanced legal restrictions from Pyongyang — such as the Anti-Reactionary Thought and Culture Law, passed in 2020 — shows how seriously Pyongyang is taking this threat to its authority, according to the experts participating in the 38 North event.

Radio silence 'does the regime's work'

"I am sure the government in Pyongyang is very happy at this development," said Lim Eun-jung, a professor of international studies at Kongju National University.

"Halting these broadcasts means the people there only have North Korean state media to listen to now and they will know less and less about what is happening in the outside world," she told DW.

"In one sense, I can understand the South Korean government's decision as it did not want tensions to escalate further and hoped to open lines of communication with the North, but at the same time this means that people living in a country that is already essentially a prison now have even less access to information."

North Korean defector Kim said that, while foreign broadcasts did not play a large part in her own defection three decades ago, they later grew to become a critical tool against the regime.

"The broadcasts taught people in North Korea what human rights are," she said. "It told them what freedom is. For some, it made them fight for that freedom by leaving the North. I cannot understand why we have done the regime's work for it by ending these broadcasts."

Edited by: Wesley Rahn