hankyoreh

Approximately fifty career television producers held a protest at KBS yesterday to defend public broadcasting. They are individuals who joined KBS in the late eighties and are all now in positions of responsibility within the broadcasting company, and they called on younger journalists and producers to join the struggle. This confirms the gravity of the situation there.

These are the producers that worked to transform KBS from its image as a broadcaster that was biased towards the dictatorships, and would dutifully begin the news at the top of the hour with coverage of what President Chun Doo-hwan had done that day, to “the most trusted news media” that it has become today. They say they are taking action because they “believed there was common sense agreement” about what public broadcasting should be, but that “public broadcasting is about to be crumble because of capital and those in political power.”

The administration of President Lee Myung-bak has made seizing control of the broadcast media its greatest priority. It has used all sorts of extra-legal maneuvers to get its people in the top leadership positions at broadcasting networks to make them broadcast to the administration’s liking. Finding that insufficient, it is trying to domesticate them with talk about budgets and spending approval. The new KBS president is appointing people to positions while being mindful of what the administration wants.

On September 17, new KBS President Lee Byung-soon, someone accused of being rewarded the position for his service to Lee Myung-bak when he was a presidential candidate, got his revenge on participants in the “KBS Employee Action to Defend Public Broadcasting,” which, among other things, included physically trying to prevent him from coming to work. Revenge came in the form of his first round of personnel assignments.

The effect of those assignments was that the current events and investigative programs that have played a special role in increasing public confidence in the broadcaster have essentially been dismantled. We now know exactly what Lee was talking about when, in his installation address, he said he would consider doing away with “programs that have faced a lot of criticism.” He has essentially declared to the whole world that he is going to erase all that was accomplished by the broadcasting democratization movement and return KBS to the pro-regime network that it was twenty years ago. He has the tacit support of the administration, the conservative print media, and the retrogressing union, so he may have thought it was going to be easy. He may have been confident that he could disperse his opponents and disarm them by taking their work away.

He is wrong, however. The fight for freedom in the news media continued during the dark years of the Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan regimes. The politically-conscious employees who fought for democratization in broadcasting over the past twenty years are not going to surrender so easily and he was mistaken to think they would. Now, you can see these older producers joining in the struggle being carried on by the younger individuals in the Employee Action, the Reporters Association, and the United Producers Association.

Lee Byung-soon needs to withdraw his retaliatory appointments immediately, as they ignored the most basic principles of personnel management there. He must immediately stop his attempt to turn KBS into an arm of the Lee Myung-bak administration. If not, he should be prepared to face opposition that will grow to beyond the confines of KBS and spread to the rest of the population.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]