The Freedom of the State’s Press to Deceive the People Shall Be Abridged

[Updated below] In the wake of a court’s decision ordering a retraction of a distorted, sloppy, and  false  MBC report that triggered massive anti-government protests, Lee Myung Bak is moving to clean house.   A principled approach would be to ask why Korea’s government (or for that matter, ours) is in the business of broadcasting the news anyway and just saw off this vestigial limb.  Instead, Lee is being Lee and conducting a purge.

The shakeup culminated on Friday at national broadcaster KBS — the equivalent of Britain’s BBC or Canada’s CBC — when its board of directors voted to dismiss the company’s chief, Jung Yun-joo. The vote, called for by the government’s audit agency that accused him of “poor management” was a distressing, tearful scene, with hundreds of KBS reporters and producers jostling with police officers as they tried to enter the meeting hall to physically stop the balloting. Some were dragged by police along the ground. Some lost consciousness. [Yonhap]

KBS, though not the propagator of the original mad cow falsehoods, brayed along with the stampede by drawing inflammatory  comparisons between it  and the democracy movement of the 1980’s.  Let the head-shaving, public scuffling, and wails of “censorship” begin, and let the wailing come from the leftist “reformers” who put Roh Moo Hyun into office just a few years ago:

The Journalists’ Association of Korea condemned the voting as “a coup d’etat.”

The Lee government is not the only one to have planted its cronies in government-funded major broadcasters. New administrations in Korea have traditionally tried to get the media on their side before carrying out new policies. Watchers lament, however, that Lee, who gained power on promises to make a fresh break from former President Roh Moo-hyun, is repeating the same old tactics and his are a far graver threat to media independence.

“I feel helpless. It makes me think whatever we say — what use it can be?” Won Yong-jin, a mass communications professor at Sogang University and leading critic of the Korean media, asked. “With the parliament controlled by the ruling party, it is the role of the media to take a critical stance and keep government power in check to serve the interest of the people, their readers and their audience. It is a very unfortunate thing for all of us that the government tries to bring the media on its side,” he said.

He compared the current government’s media shakeup to that in 2003, when Roh appointed his presidential campaign advisor, Seo Dong-ku, as the KBS president. In the face of fierce criticism from conservative media and the then opposition Grand National Party, which called for a nonpolitical, neutral figure, Seo was forced to resign in 11 days. Roh reconciled with critics by naming Jung, the current KBS chief and a career journalist with the liberal daily Hankyoreh.

Yes, we all know what guardians of a free press Roh and his people were … not.  When they weren’t using their powers to tax and other powers of the state to  suppress opposition media, they were taking a laissez-faire attitude toward  left-wing thugs who made threats against Radio Free North Korea, blocked the U.S. Ambassador from attending a media interview,  carried out  multiple violent assaults on American service members, attacked non-violent human rights activists, burned down a pro-opposition paper’s printing house, and attacked  its retired chairman.  Roh’s government denied trying to shut down “Yoduk Story,” a play  depicting North  Korea’s concentration camps,  before opening night, but no arrests were ever made of those who allegedly forced investors to back out of the production.  Meanwhile, producers of anti-American films were subsidized and  protected from foreign competition.  Was this a climate in which the press, to the extent it was inclined,  felt free to level accurate criticism against, say, the ongoing mass murder of North Koreans?  Just ask them. 

This is not to suggest that censorship justifies censorship; I make this point for the exclusive purpose of leveling a charge of hypocrisy.  Nothing Lee has done so far  so closely meets the definition of  censorship as Roh’s  treatment of  unfriendly media.  It did so both directly and vicariously, through so many examples of selective non-enforcement of the law that simple police incompetence just doesn’t explain it.  That  hypocrisy won’t keep the Korean left from invoking free-press martyrdom, but I hope I’ve helped you to put all of this into perspective.

At the same time, I don’t see demanding  accountability for incompetent, manipulative, and malicious journalistic malpractice as censorship.   If the taxpayers are funding the news, the least they  should be able to expect  is  comptence and  truth.  The inherent disadvantage of having the government in the news business is that the  management of MBC and KBS serve at the government’s pleasure.   If they want  complete freedom from accountability for  serving up bullshit  that  provokes  a national crisis — a crisis  that at least some of the usual suspects  saw as a way to bring down  Korea’s elected government  — let them go work for OhMyNews, Pressian, or  the Hanky.  Oh, wait:

The Korea Commission for the Press on Tuesday selected 12 beneficiaries of state subsidies for newspaper companies.

Beneficiaries of subsidies under controversial new press laws include eight dailies including the government-friendly Hankyoreh and Kyonghyang, the three online newspapers OhMyNews, Pressian and Issuei, and one magazine. The commission said it selected the 12 out of 32 applicants for the subsidy based on 10 screening categories.

The commission will distribute a total of W15.7 billion (US$1=W943) among the news companies this year. Some W200 million will be spent on improving readers’ rights, W400 million on management consulting, W7.5 billion on corporate restructuring and new business projects and W7.5 billion on updating facilities and promoting computerization.  [Chosun Ilbo, July 4, 2006]

More here  and here.  If the power to tax is the power to destroy, then the power to subsidize  eventually becomes the power to censor.   Can anyone name one leftist Korean news organization with a major audience that was not subsidized or funded by Roh Moo Hyun’s government? 

One wonders how taking the Hankyoreh slant out of South Korean public television, which occupies a good share of the market, might change attitudes toward North Korea:

“Considering the situation from President Lee’s point of view, the behavior of the media, whose chiefs were appointed by Roh, didn’t let the current government work its way. It was even — to put it extremely — pro-North Korea,” Ko Sang-tu, a politics professor of Yonsei University, said.

“The cost will be high at the beginning of his term, but he thinks there will be larger benefits later on. The ongoing friction and his falling approval will be temporary, and the situation will eventually turn in favor of him,” he said.

He cited the remarkable change of the Korean people’s view toward North Korea over the past 10 years. Their confrontational mindset thawed with sympathy as liberal Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun introduced reconciliatory exchanges with the North, which were aired in the media.

I’m sure the boys at government-funded Yonhap must have felt conflicted while  writing this.  At times during Roh’s term, Yonhap also seemed to be borrowing its material from the Rodong Sinmun.  Still, given the likely impact on them,  their effort is admirably balanced, and it was fair of them to point out that Lee’s actions thus far aren’t really any different from Roh’s.  One still might have hoped Korea would do better than this, but if I were in  Lee’s position, I’m not sure that I’d have felt free not to get rid of people whose interest in pulling the levers of power exceeded their interest in speaking the truth.  No one elected the presidents of KBS or MBC to govern the Republic of Korea  through a vanguard elite of 14-year-olds, radicals, and online myth-writers (ht). 

At this point, it’s  starting to  look  like  Lee has survived this first major challenge  to his leadership reasonably well.  Some have criticized the way Lee handled the beef imports question, but now that’s it emerged that the decision to allow U.S. beef imports  was probably made by his predecessor, and that the usual suspects were lying in ambush, unrestrained by plausibility or truth, I’m not sure what Lee could have done to foresee this.  It hardly even  makes sense in retrospect.  The end result is that Lee’s most influential  opponents and their lawless tactics have been discredited, and Lee now has a perfectly good excuse to knock them down a peg and enforce the law as written.   In one sign of how the silent majority must  feel, American beef is  selling well.   I’ll be interested in seeing whether Lee’s poll numbers recover.

Update:   Now the KBS Chairman is under arrest for “mismanagement,” which sounds a little hokey.  But the ideological subtext is interesting:

The KBS shakeup is seen as indicative of the increasing friction between the conservative Lee government and major broadcasters that have been critical of his pro-business reform and hardline stance on North Korea. Lee has already replaced the heads of public broadcasters SkyLife, Arirang TV and YTN with close confidants, many of whom worked closely with Lee during his presidential election campaign last year.

Opposition and civic organizations berate Jung’s dismissal as an attempt at media control, while conservative circles justify the move, accusing the one time KBS chief of “incompetence” and “leftist” bias.  [Yonhap]

I’d be much more interested in any evidence of North Korean influence over the government broadcaster than I would be in the officials’ lawful  exercise of discretion in their financial management decisions.  Bias and  shoddy journalism?  Check, and good reason  for a new administration to bring in fresh and more like-minded faces.  But  arrests, absent evidence of something we’d recognize as an actual crime,  transform a  normal political transition into a purge.