Sohn Byoung Soo, a business reporter for Seoul's mass-circulation newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, is no visionary. Like nearly every other reporter in South Korea, he failed to foresee the worst economic crisis to hit the country in decades.
But on December 4--the day after Seoul struck a $57 billion bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund--Sohn gave the first sign that the Korean press had recognized its mistake, and was ready to learn and move on. In a mea culpa column, Sohn said he and his colleagues covering the Ministry of Finance and Economy had overlooked the signs of South Korea's financial woes and allowed themselves to be blinded by official news releases.
"I owed my readers an explanation as to how we journalists led them astray on the real depths of the problem facing us at that time," says the soft-spoken, 14-year veteran reporter. Even in the final days of last November, when media around the world sounded an alarm over the imminent bankruptcy of Korean companies, Sohn claims he was responsible for spreading euphoria. "We were guilty of printing government statements without checking the facts," he wrote.
Unfortunately, Sohn's contrition did not catch on. "Not a thing has changed since then," says a disgusted Kim Young Ho, a retired editor of Seoul daily Segye Ilbo. "The media profession is simply the most backward profession in the Korean society today."
As South Korean President Kim Dae Jung battles to open the economy and break up the country's oversized and often uncompetitive chaebols, or business groups, critics of the press say it should be leading the way--as it so crucially did during South Korea's fight for democracy in the 1980s.
It should provide analysis, boost public awareness and build consensus. But so far, these roles are something that journalists seem either unable or unwilling to shoulder.
Part of the problem is that the press remains too entrenched in the system. Some of the very companies targeted in the dismantling of Korea Inc. own the country's biggest newspapers. That means that powerful news organizations linked to these groups have tended to be lukewarm at best to President Kim's reform drive. Politically powerful families who find comfort in the status quo hold other newspapers. As one reporter from a major daily says "If you want to get ahead in the newsroom, you stop complaining and write stories that will please the owners."
This attitude is wildly different from that of the 1980s when journalists defied owners--often sacrificing their jobs or ending up in jail--to fight for democracy and to establish one of the freest presses in Asia. The fact is Economic reform simply isn't something in which Korean journalists have a vested interest.
Indeed, journalists themselves often form the core of Korea Inc.'s familiar philosophical outlook suspicion of globalization as a hidden agenda of foreign investors bent on taking over Korean companies at a low price. Journalists "regard foreign investment mainly from the viewpoint of ownership, not as something that can provide jobs and technology," says a senior government official from the Ministry of Finance and Economy.
But the government must also take responsibility for advancing this view, the official concedes. Past military governments have a well-established history of promoting a can-do spirit among Koreans, asserting the desirability of exports over imports, and overseas borrowings over foreign direct investments to fuel growth.
Caught unprepared when the country's bubble economy burst, a shocked local media reacted with a wave of nationalism, finger-pointing and mass campaigns, including calls for the public to stop using foreign products and taking foreign vacations--tactics that even the government has begun to shun. "They don't realize that it's time now for a paradigm shift," the official says.
The country's top 10 newspapers continue to rely on what some critics disdainfully call "parrot journalism"--transmitting statements from the government or chaebols with little objectivity or no further investigation.
For example, the public has no notion of how many Koreans are truly unemployed. Why? Many stories cite only government figures, which follow the unusual International Labour Organization rule of counting as fully employed anyone with just a few hours of gainful work per week.
Furthermore, reports on crucial banking-sector reform, which will cost 64 trillion won ($48.7 billion) of taxpayers' money, rarely provide critical analysis of specific measures the government is taking. Nor do they focus on what the general public really thinks about this way of resolving the issue, says former editor Kim Young Ho, who is researching the causes of the media's failure to make the public aware of the crisis earlier.
Most analyses on bank bailouts regurgitate the views of the government's financial-supervisory commission. "Korean reporters don't seem to have their own identity, no firm views on things they report," says a foreign securities analyst who spent many years in Seoul.
Part of the problem may lie in journalists' unpreparedness. Understanding a story as complicated as the financial crisis, being able to explain it to the public, and leading the way towards change require a greater specialization than the sort of one-dimensional reporting that was needed to rally support for democracy, say observers. "Their professional training is no match for the story they cover," says Chang Hosoon, a communications professor at Soonchunhyang University, south of Seoul.
For their part, reporters blame editors and publishers for inadequate investment in manpower training, accusing them of wasting money on high-cost buildings and printing presses. Often, the press slips into mounting noisy, short-lived campaigns rather than focusing on hard-hitting analysis. For months, the media have advocated that Koreans save rather than spend their money--exactly the opposite of what many economists say is needed to spark growth.
Similarly, last December, Korea Broadcasting System and Munhwa Broadcasting Corp.--the two main national television channels--vied with each other in whipping up mass emotion, appealing to citizens to surrender their gold for export to help replenish dwindling foreign reserves. As they competed for more gold, the media stigmatized higher-income earners for failing to come forward with gold bars that they supposedly held. Harkening back to the days of Korea's independence movement under Japan's occupation, grandmothers parted with their gold hairpins and wedding rings. More than $500 million worth of gold was collected and exported. If this burst of patriotism was spiritually uplifting, it made for poor business judgment. Critics complained that the campaign triggered a drop in the international price of gold, which meant owners received less for their wares.
Nam Si Uk, publisher of Munhwa Ilbo, a national daily, contends that any failure on the part of the press is unintentional. "Our media need time to adjust to the new challenge of globalism," says Nam. "It's not that we're against the agenda of reform or opening."
But for those who don't necessarily agree with that, finding a solution is a Catch-22. President Kim has repeatedly vowed to reform the press by separating its management from chaebol ownership. In order to win support for this, though, Kim needs the media on his side to fight chaebol resistance. That's a tough balancing act. If he doesn't succeed, expect Korean media to remain crisis-ridden for some time to come.
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Added November 3, 1998