hankyoreh

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission had officially confirmed that the predecessor to the National Intelligence Service, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, was behind the Park Chung-hee administration’s attacks on companies advertising in the newspaper the DongA Ilbo in 1974 and the newspaper’s sudden firing of dozens of its journalists in 1975. According to the commission’s report, the DongA Ilbo was in collusion with the KCIA in going along with demands that certain journalists be removed from their jobs, essentially handing over its personnel management authority to the government, meaning the newspaper has responsibility to bear for its participation in suppression of press freedoms.

The details of the case, as revealed in the commission’s report, are shocking and tragic. As part of its drive to crush the campaign for a free press in Korea, the KCIA made advertisers pledge, in writing, that they would stop advertising with the newspaper, and in the course of its effort, physically detained people and threatened them with tax audits. The KCIA forced the newspaper to have five of its upper level editorial staff check with it before running any advertisements again. The newspaper, in turn, accommodated that demand. The result was that a lot of journalists lost their jobs and criticism of the government by the media was nipped in the bud.

Suppression of the news media, in which the government tries to quiet criticism and make media organizations subservient to it, is not something that exists only in the past. It is happening right now. At the cable news broadcaster YTN, six media professionals were fired and 27 others given what were essentially demotions for rejecting the authority of a new company president, someone who had been put in that position for having been a close aide to President Lee Myung-bak. At KBS, employees who came out in opposition to the administration’s attempts to seize control of the company were similarly retaliated against with undesirable assignments. Interference in news coverage and television program content is becoming more serious, too. The ways the governments in power at the time and now feign disinterest by calling it all “legitimate personnel management” or “a company’s internal matter” are the same, both then and now.

The truth behind acts that seek to crush press freedoms, however, are ultimately recorded in history. There exists no example where attempts to hurt freedoms of press and conscience have been successful to the very end. Furthermore, Korea’s citizens today are people living in the information age, people who won this democracy twenty years ago and have enjoyed it ever since. It is only an anachronistic attempt to go against the times to try to turn back the clock and seize control of the news media.

The government and the DongA Ilbo should accept the formal recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and apologize for what happened, and take concrete action to make amends to the journalists who were dismissed. The Lee Myung-bak administration should make these findings a good point of departure for giving up on its attempt to seize control of the news media. The DongA Ilbo was both perpetrator and victim in this, and the advice of the journalists who are senior to those who are there now becomes that much more profound. The committee that in Korean is known as the DongA Teugwi, a group of the journalists who were fired at the time, says the paper should “stop irresponsible reporting meant to feed the Korean public disinformation, and instead return to the ‘spirit of the October 24 free press declaration,’” a reference to a statement made at that time back in 1974 when they all gathered in the DongA newsroom and announced they would fight against any attempts to keep them quiet.

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