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On 2 May 2018, Charisma Magazine, a monthly publication aimed at devout Christian readers, posted a story written by minister J. Lee Grady with the hopeful headline, North Korea Will Open Its Doors to Christianity. The article was written amid news of historic thawing of relations between North and South Korea and talk of the North dismantling its nuclear program. One day later, the notoriously disreputable blog YourNewsWire.com reappropriated the piece, for the most part republishing it word-for-word — but attaching their own writer's name to it. YourNewsWire also rewrote the headline to misleadingly report that North Korea's acceptance of Christianity was a done deal: North Korea Agrees To Open Its Doors To Christianity. But because the original story doesn't claim that North Korea is already welcoming the free practice of Christianity, the article doesn't support YourNewsWire's headline. Instead, it expresses religious views about ongoing developments on the Korean peninsula and hopes that Christians will make inroads soon: Although the repressive state of North Korea may well some day welcome religion, it is currently de facto prohibited. Ji-Min Kang, a columnist for NK News who lived in Pyongyang until 2005, explained the dynamic in a 2014 column: YourNewsWire frequently generates clicks by latching on to the news cycle and adding their own outlandish, conspiratorial, or outright false narratives to actual news stories. For example, the site in 2017 lumped the suicide deaths of rock singers Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington in with the notorious (and utterly ridiculous) Pizzagate conspiracy theory, falsely reporting they were murdered because they were about to expose a ring of entertainment industry pedophiles.
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