hankyoreh

“Why Does MB Have Tears in His Eyes?” introducing stories of citizens who were helped by President Lee Myung-bak.

Lee Moon-young

As we stand at the end of 2010, the South Korean press is an embarrassment.

The diagnosis was harsh: “An abundance of defense of the Lee Myung-bak administration, the disappearance of criticism, and journalism left without a leg to stand on.”

It was a year in which broadcasting bowed to political pressure, while newspapers voluntarily stifled their own voices. There was an outpouring of assessments about the seizure of broadcasting through parachute appointments of network presidents. These were accompanied by assessments about the seizure of newspapers with comprehensive programming networks as bait luring in any press members that might check the Lee administration’s powers.

2010 marks the first year in the Lee Myung-bak administration’s effective seizure of broadcasting. The parachute appointments continued from the Lee administration, with the 2008 appointment of Koo Bon-hong as YTN president followed by appointments of KBS presidents Lee Byung-soon and Kim In-kyu in 2008 and 2009 and MBC President Kim Jae-chul in 2010.

In particular, KBS solidified its role as an administration public relations arm this year following the late 2009 appointment of Kim In-kyu, who worked as an election adviser during Lee Myung-bak’s presidential campaign. His predecessor, Lee Byung-soon, had already neutralized internal criticism and critical programs. Kim proceeded to fill the airwaves of public broadcasting with reporting and programs that endorsed President Lee and his administration’s policies. This reached a height with the G-20 Summit onslaught and the glorification of the United Arab Emirates nuclear power plant contract.

In contrast, news that would prove burdensome for the administration was willfully omitted and kept off the air. There was also the continuation of a relativistic hard line against members who objected to “broadcasting where you can’t say anything,” with some 60 striking members of the new labor union referred to the disciplinary committee and former investigative reporting team leader Kim Yong-jin suspended for four months after writing a contribution for an outside outlet criticizing the network.

The same mechanism of punishment of critics within the company, abolition of government watchdog programs, and domestication of reporting was also seen at MBC. A number of observers within and outside the network say that MBC’s reporting bore the brunt of criticisms as Kim Jae-chul settled in his position following controversies over Foundation for Broadcast Culture Kim Woo-ryong’s remarks about being “kicked in the shins” by the “big house” and a strike by the labor union. While Kim went about building a pro-administration system with a “spring cleaning of leftists,” dismissals were given to labor committee head Lee Geun-haeng, who led the strike, and Jinju MBC branch head Jeong Dae-gyun, who opposed a merger with the local affiliate. With its proliferation of programs targeting viewership rating - “Who+” was taken off the air - critics are saying that MBC has entered the “turnoff for commercial broadcasting.” Symbolic of the state of the South Korean press in 2010, as created by the administration’s seizure of broadcasting, is the repeat of the Aug. 17 icing of a “PD Notebook” episode on the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project with a similar decision not to air a Dec. 7 episode on the same topic by KBS’s “In Depth 60 Minutes.”

Criticisms of the Lee administration were also conspicuously fewer in the pages of newspapers. The leading explanation has this as the outcome of the tug-of-war between newspapers and the administration over broadcasting project rights. Besides SBS, another broadcaster, and the Yonhap News agency, a total of eight newspaper companies entered the race for comprehensive and news channels. Five aimed for comprehensive networks and three for news channels, staking their fate on project approval. Liberty Forward Party Chairman Lee Hoe-chang referred to the newspapers that engaged in endorsement of the Lee administration in order to gain project rights as “slaves to comprehensive programming.”

In a Jan. 8 page three article titled “Why Does MB Have Tears in His Eyes?,” the JoongAng Ilbo looked at one year of emergency economic countermeasures. The piece introduces the stories of citizens who were helped out and includes a photograph of President Lee wiping tears from his eyes. Beginning with the line “[President Lee] gains courage from seeing chapped lips,” the article goes on to tell the story of an individual named Choe who “met President Lee and gained a chance to rise again.”

“As he listened to the story, President Lee’s eyes welled up with tears,” it says.

Such fawning articles fairly plastered the pages of conservative newspapers in 2010. On Dec. 6, following the conclusion of renegotiations on the South Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), the Dong-A Ilbo printed a single block editorial in its daily urging a National Assembly ratification.

The fierce newsprint lobbying waged among these newspapers in their bid for project approval, as they wrote self-congratulatory pieces stressing how optimal they would be for broadcasting, resembled nothing so much as below-the-belt fighting. Things reached the point where it was even said, at a Nov. 3 experts’ debate on detailed review criteria for comprehensive and news channels, that providers should be examined for whether they wrote articles pressuring the Korea Communications Commission in order to create a more favorable review environment. The KCC, for its part, has done its best to hold off newspapers’ criticism of the administration. They have refused to disclose the number of providers that the current broadcasting market can accommodate or the number of planned selections.

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