Patrick Boehler

Last week, TIME.com readers chose North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as their Person of the Year in a vote heavily manipulated by online forums like 4Chan. But that’s not stopping North Korea’s state-run news agency from a little selective tooting of their supreme leader’s horn. On Tuesday, just before the real Person of the Year was announced, the Korean Central News Agency gave TIME a shout-out in a slightly misleading news release:

The U.S. magazine The Time selected the dear respected Kim Jong Un as “man of 2012″. The magazine has selected and published “man of the year” every year from 1927. This year, it conducted on-line voting among subscribers including politicians, businessmen, artistes, sportspersons and announcers for the man of this year. More than 5.6 million people, the greatest number, voted for Kim Jong Un.

The 29 year-old, who took up the reins after his father Kim Jong Il died in Dec. last year, indeed won by an overwhelming majority in the online poll, with 5.6 million votes after Internet forums like 4Chan launched a campaign to manipulate the results. A month earlier, the website of China’s Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, fell for a spoof by the U.S. satirical website The Onion naming Kim Jong Un “sexiest man alive.”