hankyoreh

in front of Cheongwoon Hyojadong Community Service Center in Seoul’s Jongno district

By Kim Ki-seong and Kim Il-woo, staff reporters in Ansan

The reason grief-stricken family members of victims in the Sewol ferry sinking headed for the Blue House on May 9, carrying portraits of their children, was remarks by KBS newsroom chief Kim Si-gon that triggered an explosion of pent-up distrust and frustration with the media’s reporting on the disaster and its aftermath. What sent the relatives into the streets was a combination of repeatedly inaccurate reporting, the failure to cover family members’ criticisms of the government’s irresponsible behavior, and boorish behavior by reporters at the scene.

From the day the sinking occurred on Apr. 16, news outlets have been competing to provide up-to-the-minute coverage. But much of the coverage was wrong or misleading, sparking an outcry from the bereaved family members. On the morning of the sinking, television networks said that all 325 high school students on board the ship had been rescued - a report that proved devastatingly false. MBC drew the ire of students’ parents on the day of the accident, when attention should have been focused on the rescue effort, by reporting on the amount of the insurance payouts the victims’ family members would receive. SBS aired images of a reporter grinning while covering the vessel’s sinking.

Parents were further angered when Yonhap News printed an articled titled “Biggest Search Effort in History” at a time when family members were protesting about discrepancies between the number of rescue workers announced by the government and the number actually on the scene. In Jindo and other locations, family members protested to reporters that news outlets were “failing to report the facts and covering up the truth to protect the government,” and that both the rescue and recovery efforts were being bungled.

Ultimately, the administration failed to rescue any of the missing passengers. The students on board were all found lifeless, yet much of the media coverage has failed to address the anger of their families. When President Park Geun-hye paid a visit to the government memorial in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province on the morning of Apr. 29, some network chose to omit any mention of the angry relatives protesting there. The images that were aired showed only Park consoling and holding the hand of an elderly woman - who turned out not to be a family member. The protesting family members were not shown at all.

The following day, a number of conservative newspapers printed front-page stories showing Park alone burning incense for the victims, along with articles reporting her statements at a Cabinet meeting the day before, when she talked about “getting rid of the bureaucratic Mafia for good” and “root out all of these longstanding vices.”

Meanwhile, journalists on the scene upset family members with inconsiderate, and occasionally boorish, methods and behavior. Some took close-up pictures of grieving family members without requesting permission or asking for understanding beforehand. Others went into second-year classrooms at Danwon High School in Ansan, where many of the missing or deceased passengers were students, to rummage through their items and take photographs, with some of them smoking inside the school. Students going to school or pay respects to the victims were stopped and filmed or photographed, with reporters asking questions about their feelings about the disaster.

At 11 am on Apr. 24, the father of a student who survived the sinking came into the press room at the government memorial to make an appeal. “Please don’t take pictures of kids going to school or grab them for interviews. I’m begging you,” the father said.

When news spread that KBS newsroom chief Kim Si-gon had made remarks comparing victims of the sinking to South Korea’s yearly traffic fatalities, incensed family members headed into the streets on May 8, despite the network’s protestations that the reports were untrue.

Yoo Kyung-geun, 44, the spokesman for a committee representing victims, missing passengers, and survivors from the disaster, said media coverage had been a longstanding issue before Kim’s alleged remarks.

“There was a lot of frustration building up among the family members as a result of the misreporting by some news outlets and the biased coverage that ignored what the relatives of the victims were saying,” Yu said.

“It looks like Mr. Kim’s remarks were the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he added.

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