You'd rather western press where they can publish any lie and denial of reality that suits capital interests? There are certain lies propagated by the west for the purpose of destabilizing the DPRK, which I don't believe the DPRK is obligated to let float around in order for me to respect their democratic sovereignty.

You just won't convince me that it's a bad thing to enforce a shared observable reality which can be questioned and improved upon but not invented out of whole cloth to serve imperialist interests. The people don't need to be told what their interests are; they're the ones living their daily lives to observe that, and should be the ones doing the telling. Anything reported to them should be a plain factual recounting of events.

A democracy based on lies and manipulation is no democracy at all, which ironically happens to be what we have here in the west. For as "free" as our media purports to be, good luck getting any reach without a capitalist backing you in some form (especially before social media but even today; now that they've captured a large enough audience; the capitalists behind big tech are tightening up on what is allowed to have a platform). Which explains why you always see westerners project that onto any country they consider worse off and "authoritarian", as if that is the sole reason why and actually "the free press" makes us immune to it.