DPRK Media on "Satellite" Launch

So the launch didn’t go so well…
http://www.northkoreatech.org/2012/04/13/launch-failure-special-news-broadcast

Voice of Korea Announcement of failed launch.

This is very interesting. The last Kwangmyongsong didn’t succeed at all, but every North Korean is told that it did. This time, why would they admit to their own people that they failed?

UPDATE: April 23, 2012
http://destinationpyongyang.blogspot.com/2012/04/holding-north-korea-to-higher-standard.html

The truth is probably simple, as the truth often is. In essence, the authorities were forced to quickly conclude that they couldn’t keep such a thing under wraps forever.

Born of watching Pyongyang’s approach to World Cup qualifying matches over a number of tournament cycles, my hypothesis is that the authorities had assumed (wrongly) that they would be able to manage the launch by recording it and then showing it off to reporters as and when it had been confirmed as a success (a fair presumption being that this would be the case, since the last time a similar stunt was tried the rocket went a very, very long way indeed).
…
In the light of that fact, one question stands out: could it be that if the international media, notably Associated Press but also ITAR-TASS and Xinhua, were to “man up” and do the job journalists should be doing in deeply inhospitable environs (rather than the opposite, which KCNA already does to great effect) and if the South Korean government could simultaneously be persuaded to permit a broad range of radio broadcasters to utilize domestic FM frequencies to broadcast (informative, rather than openly propagandist) news and current affairs information into North Korea on a daily basis, at cheaper rates and with greater clarity than current circumstances allow, then we would have the capacity to hold the government of Kim Jong Eun to higher standards of honesty going forward than has ever been the case before?

I’m really surprised they were able to find a way to explain the failure to their people:
http://38north.org/2012/04/jchurch042112

Kim Jong Un. Overall, it wasn’t a bad week for Kim Jong Un. I don’t know if he was embarrassed by the satellite launch failure. The young do not embarrass so easily, and we might have taken it more seriously than he did. In any case, Kim—or a very wise advisor—quickly cut the North’s losses by admitting the failure in a rather “Houston, we have a problem” vein. The scientists would look into what went wrong, we were told. Nor was this said sotto voce. The regime broke into domestic programming at the prime noon hour to make the announcement. If anyone is in trouble, it might not be the scientists who worked on the project but whoever assured Kim that there was no way the launch would fail. So far, there are no heads rolling around, not that we can see at least, but this may have been a learning experience for the young ruler. Advisors are fine, but don’t believe everything they tell you.