hankyoreh

Sung Il-jong, the head of the People Power Party’s task force on “verifying the protection of Korea’s oceans,” speaks at a debate at the National Assembly building on July 19 about the discharge of water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant. (Yonhap)

Several media outlets have reported that the Hankyoreh was labeled a “loudspeaker for scaremongering rumors” at a debate on Wednesday concerning the release of wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant co-sponsored by the People Power Party (PPP) and conservative civic organizations such as the Solidary for Fair Media.

According to the reports, during a discussion at the National Assembly on the spread of rumors concerning the Fukushima water release, Heo Yeop, the director of Citizens Action for Fair Media claimed, “After the March Korea-Japan summit, the Democratic Party began to spread scaremongering rumors and the Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang Shinmun conspired to expand on and repeat the rumors, as well as acting as loudspeakers disseminating them even further.”

I was curious to know what made them refer to Hankyoreh in such a way, so I obtained the script of the debate.

Four Hankyoreh articles were provided as evidence for the above statement in the opening statement.

Among the four, an article that directly mentions the Democratic Party of Korea is one titled “Japan’s system for treating radioactive Fukushima water was never verified by IAEA,” which ran on the front page of our July 12 issue.

“This article showcases the same logic that Lee So-young, Democratic Party spokesperson, used a week before [the article was published] to state that ‘the performance of ALPS has not been verified,’” Heo said.

ALPS stands for Advanced Liquid Processing System, the facility Japan is using to filter the irradiated water at Fukushima.

“In response to Lee’s statement, the fact-checking team at SBS analyzed the report seven times on the July 6 broadcast and found that ‘verification of contaminated water in the last stage of discharge of ALPS could be found,’ and determined Lee’s statement to be ‘largely untrue.’”

However, this claim is incorrect in stating that the Hankyoreh’s reporting was reiterating Lee’s claim.

Lee’s remarks were in reference to the IAEA’s comprehensive review of the safety of the contaminated water discharge plan, which was finalized on July 4, while the Hankyoreh report was in reference to the IAEA’s report of the subcommittee on the handling of ALPS-treated water, which was released in 2020.

The South Korean government has responded to criticism that the IAEA has not properly verified the performance of ALPS by stating that “verification of ALPS has long been completed,” and that “a review was conducted in 2020, which led to a published report.”

The Hankyoreh found the 2020 report the government was referring to and confirmed that it was not concerned with verifying the performance of ALPS.

The Hankyoreh’s review of five reports by the IAEA since March 2013 also confirmed that the verification of the performance of ALPS was not included in the scope of any of the IAEA’s examinations.

SBS cited the results of a single contaminated water sample analysis as the basis for its conclusion that “it is difficult to believe that the IAEA did not verify the performance of ALPS.”

However, even in that analysis, the words “performance verification” are nowhere to be found in relation to ALPS.

The purpose of the analysis was to confirm the reliability of TEPCO’s analysis, not to verify ALPS.

The Hankyoreh articles, including the one about the IAEA’s failure to verify the performance of ALPS, were not bolstered by claims made by any one particular political party.

If these articles are “scaremongering rumors,” then Hankyoreh should be called a “producer” of such hoaxes, not a loudspeaker. It is an even greater insult to our paper and its journalists to call them “loudspeakers,” gadgets that simply amplify incoming signals without any judgment.

By Kim Jeong-su, senior staff writer

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