Ryan Duffy is a journalist and correspondent best known for his work with Vice Media, including accompanying Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters on a visit to North Korea in 2013.
[8] Jason Mojica, the show's executive producer, tweeted just prior to the dinner: "Um... so Kim Jong Un just got the #VICEonHBO crew wasted... no really, that happened."
"[9] Duffy, McCarthy, and the others were criticized on social media and on news sites for Tweets they posted and comments made to the press praising their cuisine, in lieu of the fact that 150,000 and 2,000,000 North Koreans died of starvation in a famine between 1994 and 1998.
The website Gawker posted intermingling tweets and photos of Mojica and his colleagues with images of starving infants and children on the verge of death.
New York Magazine commented: "Aside from the brutal slave-labor camps, the routine rape and torture of political prisoners, mass starvation extreme enough to induce episodes of cannibalism... North Korea sounds like a blast!"