North Korea has a very peculiar relationship with the press. For the country’s reporters, the hermit state “took care that journalists had hot breakfasts before they started work, and umbrellas to keep them dry when they went out reporting in the rain … and in return they ‘must become propagandists who spread far and wide the voice of [the Workers’ Party]’,” Barbara Demick writes for The New Yorker, who contrasts it with the “mutual antipathy” North Korea has with foreign press. Demick writes about Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, the BBC reporter who, along with his crew, had been following a delegation of Nobel laureates touring the country in advance of its first Workers’ Party Congress in decades, but ended up detained and, later, expelled from the country. The North Koreans did not like that Wingfield-Hayes noted that the hospital his minders took the delegation to had children that looked “healthy” and did not look like it had “real” doctors present (run time 02:48) or that a microbiology student in Kim Il Sung University did not appear to know how to access the internet (run time 03:29). “Everything we see looks like a setup … The level of control and nervousness we’ve experienced betrays the weakness and insecurity that lies beneath,” Wingfield-Hayes commented. Demick acknowledges that the BBC’s observations were “hardly original,” but notes how it underscores the degree to which North Korea is obsessed with the idea of saving face. For more footage from Pyongyang, you can watch Vice’s three-part documentary, Inside North Korea.