President’s flag faux pas causes national embarrassment at Olympics

Posted on : 2008-08-11 13:33 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
News outlets scramble to erase images of Lee Myung-bak with an upside down Korean flag

There has been a series of incidents at the Beijing Olympics involving the Korean flag, embarrassing Cheong Wa Dae and others. President Lee Myung-bak sparked a stir by rooting with an upside down Korean flag, and Cheong Wa Dae followed this up by asking media companies that ran photos of the incident to fix or erase the images.

According to Cheong Wa Dae, or the Blue House, and the relevant media companies on August 10, Lee, who was in Beijing for two days to attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing games, waved an upside down flag as he rooted for the Korean woman’s handball team in their game against Russia on the afternoon of August 9. Media such as Yonhap and Newsis had run photos of the Lee with the upside down flag by 7:30 p.m. of that day, with netizens slamming the president for disgracing the nation and calling into disrepute one of his aides.

From 10:00 p.m., however, the media in question had erased or edited the photos from not only their own photo galleries, but also Naver.com and other portal sites. People trying to enter portal site addresses where the photos were first uploaded will find a message saying the address has been changed or deleted in accordance with a request by the relevant media company. Daum, Naver and others said they had no choice but to pull the photos down after the media companies, which own the photo copyrights, asked them to do so.

Yet the action by the media outlets was revealed to have been taken because a Cheong Wa Dae official called the media companies directly on the night of August 10 to ask that the Korean flag part of the photos be edited out or the photos taken down.

A reporter with one news agency who refused to give his name said that a Cheong Wa Dae public relations official had called and asked that the problematic photo be taken down or edited. At first, the news agency edited the photo, but then a request came to take the photo down, so it was erased completely.

The photo editor at another news agency said he had decided on his own to edit the photo, considering it a matter of national image and a relatively light incident. He said there had been no request from Cheong Wa Dae.

A Cheong Wa Dae official said the president had not brought a Korean flag with him, so he borrowed one from another spectator at the game, and was embarrassed since nobody had known it was upside down. He said they had contacted the media companies and told them of the situation to earn their understanding, with Yonhap and Newsis granting the presidential office’s request.

Moreover, some are pointing out that the official Korean flag used by the Korean team in Beijing was not produced according to standards. The flag, including both the big one carried by Jang Seong-ho in the opening ceremony and the smaller ones used during the medal ceremonies, uses trigrams that are smaller than the standard and spread twice as far apart. The Korean Olympic organizing committee said the design received last year from the Korean Culture and Information Service was smaller than the real thing, and it appears that a mistake was made by the committee when it was expanded.

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

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