hankyoreh

President Yoon Suk-yeol answers questions from the press as he heads into work at his Yongsan office on Nov. 18. (courtesy of the presidential office)

“Democracy isn’t a machine that runs by itself. The Constitution can only do its job when there are implicit norms about mutual toleration and institutional forbearance on the part of leaders and political parties.”

Was it just because of the events of that day? In my ears, I kept hearing the words of Harvard University professor Daniel Ziblatt, who gave the keynote address at the Asia Future Forum held by the Hankyoreh on Nov. 10. The Hankyoreh reporters who had begun arriving at the venue that morning were talking about the presidential office’s decision the night before to bar MBC journalists from sitting in on the presidential aircraft.

Ziblatt is co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” which warns of how political polarization can lead to democracy’s demise. The book offers a list of the telltale signs of totalitarian behavior: the rejection of democratic norms, the denial of the legitimacy of political rivals, encouragement or condoning of violence, and attempts to suppress the basic rights of the press and political rivals.

In South Korea’s case, the second and fourth of these at least are clearly in evidence a little over six months into the Yoon Suk-yeol administration.

There’s nothing new about Yoon’s selective attitude toward the press. When he visited MBC for a televised pre-election debate organized by the National Election Commission, he never filmed a profile for the vote-counting broadcast. The situation was similar for YTN, JTBC, and Yonhap News TV.

Some places ended up resorting to the use of an artificial intelligence-rendered Yoon Suk-yeol — but he was, after all, a presidential candidate at the time.

When the ban on MBC reporters from the presidential aircraft was declared, my initial thought was that it was a one-off, an unplanned reaction by an administration feeling ornery over the reporting on its hot mic gaffe. But Yoon’s remarks on Friday about “fake news” and “upholding the Constitution” clearly signaled that the issue is not over, but just beginning.

The same day, the presidential office issued a written statement critical of MBC, using the phrase “This was malicious” no fewer than 10 times. Not only did it come across as quite emotional for an administration release, but it gave the impression of that administration “passing judgment” on the reporting.

Many people most likely thought of former US President Donald Trump, who routinely blasted critical news outlets as “fake news” media that posed a serious danger to the state.

Indeed, there actually was an episode similar to the Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang Shinmun’s boycott of the presidential aircraft. In February 2007, the Associated Press and Time declined to attend an off-the-record White House briefing after five news outlets — including CNN, the New York Times, and Politico — were suddenly excluded for having reported on matters such as allegations of Russian involvement with Trump’s camp.

This is not to say that the media always gets everything right in their reporting. Even progressive administrations have been disgruntled with the media that have criticized them.

But the activities that have been gaining momentum in the presidential office and ruling People Power Party (PPP) are a different story. Having declared that certain news outlets have been taken over by “pro-opposition” and “union” figures, they have made it clear that they intend to use any means necessary to bring them to their knees.

Under the Yushin regime in 1974, there was an incident in which the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper ran blank pages without advertisements. Behind that episode was the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, which secretly made calls to different companies.

In 2022, members of the ruling party have been brazenly making remarks insisting that major corporations should “stop advertising on MBC,” or calling for the firing of the chairperson and all the board members of the Foundation for Broadcast Culture, which appoints the MBC president.

This “pound of cure” is something an ounce of prevention could have saved, but common sense seems to be in short supply. Perhaps they are aware of the grand “issues of democracy” being invoked by the presidential staff in their struggles with the controversy over the president’s vulgar remarks.

The claim that polarization in South Korean politics is behind this collective brain freeze by those in power is only half true. At the moment, Yoon and the PPP aren’t just demonizing the opposition — they’re sending signals that they want to eradicate it entirely.

The prosecutors and the Board of Audit and Inspection would be accused of being “political investigators” the way they are if they showed even a hint of acknowledgment of the other side as equal rivals for power (mutual toleration) or exercised their lawful authority carefully to avoid compromising the intent of the law (institutional forbearance).

Yoon has gone a step further, denouncing the opposition as “pro-Pyongyang juche believers.” His reference to “cooperative governance” by Churchill and Attlee in his first administrative policy speech was just for show — included to leave evidence that he had “talked about it.”

In terms of his attitude, he seems to think that everything that needs to be done can be done through enforcement decrees, relying on authoritative interpretations from the Ministry of Government Legislation. In Ziblatt’s polite characterization, this amounts to constitutional hardball: working as aggressively as possible within the framework of the rules to ensure that victory will never again elude their side.

There’s no hope of one side “eradicating” the other when it came to power by a victory margin of just 0.7 percentage points. But the risk of this kind of eradication-oriented politics is that it accelerates polarization by handing justifications to the other side too.

Six months into the Yoon presidency, we have one side consoling itself by asking what alternatives are there that aren’t Lee Jae-myung and the other insisting that we need to do whatever it takes to topple Yoon — with some people even expressing hopes that his presidential aircraft might crash. If this keeps up throughout his term, whoever gets elected next will inherit a society where the democratic guardrails have fallen away.

As of Monday, Yoon called off his informal “doorstepping” press conferences. If everything was going to end up as a war of words between reporters and the public relations and planning secretary, it would have been better not to start them in the first place.

With the protective wall now in place, it’s curtains for the show.

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