hankyoreh

The latest topic burning up the internet is the disappearance of the “LTE News” segment on the popular SBS comedy program “People Looking for a Laugh.” Political satire has all but disappeared from the airwaves under the administrations of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye; the segment was just about the last bastion of satirical humor left in this chilled climate. The segment on Oct. 3 mentioned Park by name, noting that she has gone on an overseas tour every time an issue has arisen with one of her Blue House nominees. But when the episode was broadcast again on Oct. 9, the “LTE News” segment alone was missing. It was also gone from the SBS website’s video on demand services and YouTube.

The disappearance quickly raised suspicions that the segment had been cut because of its criticisms of the president. They are just suspicions, and may have no basis in fact. But it would have been strange for nobody to raise them, at a time when Park’s remarks about presidential insults “crossing the line” has prompted prosecutors to launch a cyber-censorship campaign. The producer has since denied any outside pressure, saying the reason the segment was cut was because it was decided that its claims that South Korea ranked first worldwide for unexplained deaths could have been “misinterpreted as meaning that many people died in disappearances and kidnappings.”

As an explanation, this is not wholly convincing. How many people out there are likely to interpret “unexplained deaths” as referring to “disappearances and kidnappings”? And if that part was the issue, it could have been cut out and reedited. Instead, everything up to and including the dig at the president’s nominees was removed. It disappeared from the SBS website’s video on demand services and from YouTube, and all without a word of explanation to viewers. It’s the kind of behavior that makes us think something happened that they don‘t want to talk about. SBS needs to come clean about exactly what did happen.

Needless to say, the root problem in all this is the Park administration: its efforts to squelch freedom of expression, and the means it had used to close off platforms for the public to speak. A country where a show isn’t free to do a little political satire is not democratic.

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