I'd be careful that you yourself don't try exaggerate your claims either. In the exact source your article links describing "serious inconsistencies in her story":

> https://thediplomat.com/2014/10/north-korea-defectors-and-th...

The rebuttals come from a Swiss-born businessman, Felix Abt, who I would say is an "interesting" guy himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Abt

https://twitter.com/felixabt

He has capitalistic incentives to keep good ties with senior executives of North Korean government agencies and enterprises. Here's an interesting tweet regarding the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act:

https://twitter.com/felixabt/status/1471787670003228680

On the whole, he seems to think the Chinese government is better than the US, to which I'll say you're entitled to your own opinions.

In the "serious inconsistencies" article he focuses on one statement:

> “Every morning at riversides like this you can see dead bodies floating. If you go out in the morning, they are there.”

His rebuttal came with a:

> a photo on his Twitter account that appears to show children happily at play in a North Korean river.

But that original statement in the article comes with an asterisk stating that the reporting was erroneous:

> *Update: It appears the newspaper misquoted Park. What she actually said was: “Every morning and every … like … some riverside like this [gesturing out the window] you can see the dead bodies floating, and if you go out in the morning and just people dead there.” It should also be noted that the BBC did in fact film a body in the Tumen river on the Chinese side of the border in 2008.

I don't doubt there were exaggerations of the story from Park. But the source of the accusation has a rather extreme personality himself.

Lastly, you should at least read the article you linked all the way through the section "UPDATE: A Response from Yeonmi Park" until the very end. I would be more surprised to see no exaggerations from a child who left a dictatorship surviving under nutritional deficiencies. Lastly, if you have ever written journalistic articles, you would know reporters oftentimes take aggressive stances to support their own arguments for the sake of publicity. I personally find the claims made in the article to be a bit reaching for straws.

As for myself, I don't think it matters if a few details were embellished, when the message still holds as a warning about authoritarian governments, generational forgetfulness, and a climate of increasing censorship.

To me, what was important about the podcast was the realization that the things described in dystopian novels are not just works of fiction, nor events of the past, but that it is happening somewhere in our world at this very moment, and that there is a very good possibility that the US can fall into such a reality as well given the increasing levels of censorship and misinformation that various parties all seem to be fighting for in order to control the minds of others.

What really scares me is that everyday people like you and me read news like this and go back to our living our normal lives afterwards as if it does not exist, and that reality goes back to being fiction as if it never existed when in fact it is the reality we live in.