North Koreans mostly receive outside information through smuggled DVDs, CDs and foreign television broadcasts, a survey showed Sunday.
The latest development underscored the steady influx of foreign information into the isolated communist country despite Pyongyang's crackdowns.
North Korea is a tightly controlled society and its people are officially forbidden from listening to news from the outside. The North views foreign influences as part of psychological warfare designed to topple the communist regime.
The survey on 71 North Korean defectors by the state-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA) found that 21.8 percent acquired outside information through DVDs and CDs, followed by television (18.3 percent), contact with Chinese people (17.6 percent), radios (15.5 percent), cell phones (6.3 percent) and leaflets (5.6 percent).
Some ethnic Koreans in China, who can speak Korean and visit North Korea relatively easily, are believed to be acting as middlepersons for North Koreans, delivering outside news and money from North Koreans' relatives in South Korea.
The North Korean defectors, who settled in the South between 2008 and 2009, rarely mentioned South Korea's private anti-Pyongyang radio broadcasts, U.S. radio broadcasts and a radio run by South Korea's military in the survey.
Twenty-two percent of the polled defectors cited news on South Korea as their favorite content while they lived in their former homeland, followed by dramas (19 percent), information on how to defect (10 percent), music (7 percent) and information on Kim Jong-il (6 percent).
About 80 percent of those who were surveyed said they received outside information either out of curiosity or unspecified economic reasons.
"The demand for information on the economy appeared to have risen, as such information could help North Koreans" who had to support themselves, the KIDA said in a quarterly magazine.
According to the survey, only 31 percent said they verbally spread outside information to other people, apparently out of fear they could face harsh punishment if caught.
The survey did not paint the whole picture of North Korea as it only polled 71 out of more than 23,500 North Korean defectors who have settled in South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. (Yonhap)