Search Results for: journalist jail libel

It looks like the ruling party realizes that the end of the Moon administration is nearing which means the potential of the conservatives winning the next election. If that was to happen no doubt the conservatives would look to start locking up their liberal political adversaries just like the Moon administration has done to them:

Ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) Chairman Lee Nak-yon is seeking to propose pardons for former presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, who have been behind bars on corruption charges, to President Moon Jae-in.

“I will propose pardons for the two former presidents to President Moon Jae-in at an appropriate time,” Lee said during a New Year interview with local news agency Yonhap. Lee said the pardons of the two former presidents could be a way to promote reconciliation and overcome the ideological gap between conservatives and liberals.

“This year is the de facto final year for President Moon to practice policies, and this matter (of pardoning the two former presidents) needs to be solved at a right time,” Lee said. “I am seeking to propose it (to President Moon) apart from pros and cons from the supporters of the ruling bloc. … The party will have to play a more active role from now on.”

As former President Lee was sentenced to 17 years by the Supreme Court last October while Park is still on trial, a special pardon and suspension of sentence will be sought for each case, if President Moon pardons the two former presidents.

Korea Times

Something that is important to remember is that this is about more than just Presidents Park and Lee being locked up, there has been numerous journalists and conservative commentators prosecuted and locked up as well for speaking out against the Moon administration.

ROK Drop favorite Dr. Tara O has a good and very detailed article published about the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye. The crux of Park’s impeachment has always been the tablet PC which many people don’t even realize was likely a fraud and not even submitted as evidence during President Park’s criminal trial:

JTBC’s claims about the tablet have not been verified.  In fact, the government’s forensic report indicates many of the documents were put into the tablet after JTBC found the tablet.  The forensic report also showed that there were multiple users of the tablet, so it could not determine to whom the tablet belonged.  The forensic report did not surface until it was too late–a year later, which is a long time after Park was already impeached. Some continued to question the validity of JTBC and Sohn Suk-hee’s claims about the tablet, and the loudest were put in jail–journalists Byun Hee-jai, and later Hwang Ui-won, Byun’s journalist colleague at the same small media outlet called MediaWatch. 

Despite what the forensic report shows, the prosecutor for Byun Hee-jai maintains that the tablet belongs to Choi, and the judges have refused, thus far, to grant Byun’s request for further discovery of the truths behind the tablet–a violation of the principle of self-defense.  Many people do not even know that the tablet was not the “smoking gun” evidence for the impeachment that JTBC claimed it was. 

In fact, the court never even admitted the tablet as evidence for either Park Geun-hye’s impeachment trial or the criminal trials that followed.  JTBC later stated that “even if there was no such thing as the [insignificant] tablet PC…, [it wouldn’t have mattered]” after initially stating the tablet was the “smoking gun.”

East Asia Research Center

Here is the most suspicious part of Park’s impeachment, the rush to get rid of her:

The National Assembly impeached the nation’s president, Park Geun-hye, in a rush.  There was no hearing, no investigation, and the voting occurred only six days after the introduction of the impeachment bill.  This rushed and unreasonable, if not unconstitutional, impeachment process differs from the U.S. President Richard Nixon case, in which there existed two separate investigations totaling 1 year and 6 months.

I think it is arguable that the impeachment had to be rushed because a true investigation would have uncovered that the tablet PC was not the smoking gun the media made it out to be.

You can read much more about Park’s impeachment at the link.

The former Finance Ministry employee who accused the Moon administration of intentionally raising the national debt has now been taken in custody for supposedly trying to commit suicide:

The former Finance Ministry official who accused the Blue House of fiddling with state coffers and intervening in private companies went missing for hours on Thursday after leaving a suicide note on the internet that read he was going to hang himself in a motel – until police found him alive.

Officers at Gwanak Police Precinct provided scant details to the local press about Shin Jae-min’s health condition but said he was hospitalized in Seoul in a “favorable state.”

Police refused to hold a press briefing detailing how they discovered Shin or what he was doing by the time they arrived at the motel in Gwanak District, southern Seoul, saying they didn’t want to “stimulate” someone who was already “mentally instable.” 

Joong Ang Ilbo

Shin allegedly left a suicide note as a web posting on a forum hosted by his alma mater Korea University:

In his post, Shin wrote that he thought people would trust him and his whistle-blowing accusations if he died. 

Shin added he hoped Korean society would adopt a culture that embraces whistle-blowers and reveal how government policies are made to the general public. 

Shin lamented blowing the whistle on a left-leaning government, saying he could have received legal help from Minbyun – Lawyers for a Democratic Society, a non-governmental organization with special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, if he was whistle-blowing on a conservative Blue House. 

Shin said he was “deeply disappointed” after hearing that every attorney in Minbyun refused to defend him if Shin revealed to the press he was being backed by the progressive group. 

I don’t know why he was surprised the Minbyun group would not help him because they are notorious for basically being Kim Jong-un’s lawyers in South Korea. They have been used to legally attack North Korean defectors, one of the groups behind the US beef riots, and have long attacked the USFK relocation plan. They have recently been calling for the signing of a peace treaty to end the Korean War so US troops can be withdrawn.

Minbyun of course are not going to do anything that would damage a North Korean friendly administration in South Korea. Shin best toughen up because the leftists in South Korea know how to defend their own and will do everything they can to destroy him. Just ask the conservative journalists sitting in jail for reporting accurate information about the Moon administration.

It seems like every week President Moon Jae-in’s approval rating continues to fall to a new low, however I don’t think it is low enough to really effect any change in his current North Korea policies yet:

President Moon Jae-in’s approval rating dropped to a record low last week, a poll showed Monday.

According to a survey by pollster Realmeter, 47.1 percent of the public said they approved of Moon’s performance, down 1.4 percentage points from last week. 

Amid an ongoing controversy over the alleged surveillance of civilians by Cheong Wa Dae, the approval rating fell to the lowest in three weeks, according to Realmeter. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but his approval rating continues to fall despite controlling most of the news media in South Korea and imprisoning and launching lawsuits against journalists that oppose him.

The Executive Editor for the Hankyoreh, Kim Jong-gu has written an open letter to the New York Times complaining about their bias against President Trump:

But as I read the newspaper’s reporting, I discovered that the Times’ reputation wasn’t grounded in fact. The pages of the newspaper were swamped with articles that openly supported Kerry. I also sincerely wanted Bush to lose the race, but the Times’ one-sided reporting made the allegations of bias in the South Korean press look like small potatoes.  (…………….)

As a South Korean citizen, however, I can’t help noticing a paradox: President Trump’s outsider status, his profound hostility to the foreign policy establishment, and his gambler-like drive to win have in fact improved the chances of peace on the Korean Peninsula. I find Trump’s unfiltered language, his wild behavior and his arrogant egotism as disgusting as anyone else. But there’s one thing for which he deserves credit, and that’s his boldness in negotiating with North Korea.

The Times is widely regarded as a progressive-leaning newspaper. Progressives believe in peace; they believe in reconciliation and win-win arrangements, not confrontation and quarrels. Obviously, it will be very difficult to bring about North Korea’s denuclearization and impossible to predict the outcome. Just as obviously, it’s the job of the press to offer a clear-headed analysis of these efforts and raise concerns when they fall short.  [Hankyoreh]

You can read more at the link, but it is a bit laughable that the Hankyoreh is complaining about bias when they are well known for being the most left wing biased major newspaper in South Korea.

I did find this statement quite entertaining from the article: “Progressives believe in peace; they believe in reconciliation and win-win arrangements, not confrontation and quarrels.”  Are South Korean conservative journalists thrown in jail for disagreeing with President Moon a sign of liberal “reconciliation”?  Is using labor unions to attack conservatives something that should be considered non-confrontational?  I could go on and on about the hypocrisy in the article which just shows the Hankyoreh should be the last newspaper in South Korea to complain about bias anywhere else.

Could you imagine what the reaction would be from mainstream journalists if the Trump administration cracked down on fake news put out by liberal websites?  The Moon administration does this against conservative websites and there is not a peep so far about it from so called journalists:

Justice Minister Park Sang-ki called on prosecutors Tuesday to crack down on fake news, saying the spread of false information undermines public trust in society and can lead to serious political and economic damages.  (……)

Opposition parties fired at Lee, saying the Moon Jae-in administration was out to suppress freedom of speech.

In a Justice Ministry press release Tuesday, Park ordered prosecutors to crack down on fake news and track whoever was responsible for its production and distribution. In cases in which serious falsehoods are clear, prosecutors were told to “actively start” investigations even before a formal complaint had been submitted to them.

The Justice Ministry said it planned to collect cases that local courts ruled to have been fake news and pass them on to the police, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Communications Standards Commission in order to request assistance in deleting them from the internet, monitoring any further spread and educating society about their false nature.

The Justice Ministry denied Park’s orders amounted to a violation of freedom of speech, saying authorities were trying to tackle the spread of fake information, which actually “disturbs” the public’s right to know and “threatens the sphere of democratic public debate.”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but remember the Moon administration has already used violence & labor unions to consolidate control of local media and been busy jailing conservative journalists using libel laws.

What makes this crackdown even more dubious is that the Druking Scandal that linked the Moon administration to election manipulation through false comment liking software has quietly went away.

Yet more libel cases to silence critics. #SouthKorean prosecutor seeks 1 year jail sentence each for #journalist Kim Se-ui & #cartoonist Yoon Seo-in. The former was making a comment on social media. #FreedomOfPress. #FreedomOfSpeechhttps://t.co/uRe0rpphze

— Tara O (@DrTaraO) September 12, 2018

I have written much about the arrest of Korean journalist Byun Hee-jae because his articles have been largely the only reporting challenging the established narrative of why former President Park Geun-hye was impeached.  So what is the established narrative of why President Park was impeached?

I think this December 2016 article by Suki Kim in Foreign Policy best sums up the established narrative that many in the public and the media believe.  ROK Heads may remember that Suki Kim is the journalist that taught English at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology for six months recording notes for what would become her 2014 book, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite.  I have no issues with Ms. Kim, but I am just using her article as example of how members of the media largely parroted the established narrative at the time that brought down former President Park Geun-hye.

Here is the opening paragraph in her Foreign Policy article about the impeachment of President Park and the rise of independent journalists in South Korea:

In late fall, I left New York City for Seoul, intending to visit for just a few days. Then, on Oct. 24, a small South Korean cable network called JTBC revealed that its reporters had discovered a tablet that had belonged to Choi Soon-sil, the hidden power behind President Park Geun-hye. The data on the device exposed a web of unprecedented corruption. In response, millions of people took to the streets, waving candles in protest, until Dec. 9, when South Korea’s parliament voted to impeach Park. [Foreign Policy]

From the start of Ms. Kim’s article you can see the importance of the tablet PC that JTBC discovered.  Would the tablet PC have been as important if people knew that JTBC had changed their story three times on how the tablet was discovered?  Would the importance of the tablet had been the same if people knew that the tablet PC could not be conclusively proven to be Choi’s. Another interesting fact is that the tablet PC did not contain Korean document editing-capable software.  So how was Choi supposedly editing sensitive documents for President Park on a tablet that did not have the software to do this?  The report with these findings was not released until a year after President Park’s impeachment and the public interest in the tablet had died down.

The big thing people should think about is in their own personal lives, how many people they know that leave their phone or tablet PC without password protection?  If you believe JTBC, this is essentially what Choi Soon-shil did, she left a tablet PC filled with sensitive documents in old office space with no password protection that allowed JTBC to find and read the documents.  This alone made me skeptical much less the other facts that have since emerged about the tablet PC.

Ms. Kim continues in her article by making an odd attack against President Trump that he received favorable coverage from the media before the US election:

Having just come from the United States, where a credulous media had been manipulated by the winning presidential candidate rather than holding him to account, I was particularly sensitive to the resilient and creative role played by South Korean reporters.

I would agree that during the Republican primaries that Donald Trump received oversized media coverage compared to other candidates.  This is because he drove ratings for the networks due to his celebrity not because they supported him in anyway.  Once he was the Republican nominee it was like a switch was flipped and the mainstream media changed to relentless negative attacks that did not stop during the lead up to the election and continues to this day.

Ms. Kim’s article continues about conservative bias in the mainstream Korean media under President Park:

The vast influence of South Korea’s independent media is a belated product of dismal failures by the country’s establishment media. For instance, there have long been three main television stations in South Korea: MBC, KBS, and SBS. But after the 2007 election to the presidency of the conservative Lee Myung-bak, the heads of the news stations were replaced by people with an explicitly pro-government stance, essentially turning the press into a propaganda machine. In 2010, thousands of journalists went on strike in response, many of whom were members of the “386 Generation,” a term for those born in the 1960s who went to college during the 1980s dictatorship and student riots. Some of the strikers eventually resigned while others were transferred to lesser divisions where they would not be able to report. It was also around this time that the government took a hand in setting up brand-new cable stations, called jongpyun, linked to the existing establishment newspapers, which were mostly in favor of the ruling Saenuri Party.

The conservative bias in the media during the Park administration is true, but there was left wing bias in the mainstream media during the prior liberal governments.  The left wing media even tried to overturn the election of former President Lee Myung-bak with the anti-US beef protests in 2008.  The Korean media aired false claims about US beef that caused violent anti-government protests.

Lee came to power after a decade of left wing rule in South Korea that saw him begin to undue many of the initiative of the prior governments.  In response the bias media and left wing groups attempted to get President Lee to resign a few months after being elected with the false US beef claims.  It can be argued that what the Korean left accomplished in getting rid of President Park is what they first attempted against President Lee in 2008.

After the anti-US beef protests President Lee decided to drive out the left wing board members from the major media outlets and use libel laws against other critics.  The political polarization of the Korean media has only continued under the Moon administration which used union protests and violence to drive out board members from KBS and MBC appointed by conservative politicians so the coverage could return to the left wing bias they had under prior liberal governments.

Ms. Kim continues in her article discussing the Sewol disaster:

During the Sewol disaster, however, energized independent journalists finally managed to break the partisan establishment media’s monopoly on the public’s attention. What on the surface appeared to be just an unfortunate accident struck at the emotional core of South Koreans in the same way the 9/11 attacks did for Americans because it revealed a pervasive rottenness under the surface of the country’s political system. It was later revealed that the sinking and the lack of rescue efforts were linked to federal-level corruption involving the ferry owners, the insurance company, the Korean coast guard, and the Korean navy.

No argument from me in regards to the corruption surrounding the Sewol disaster, however, this is nothing new and not something caused by President Park.  The fact that a business was able to run an unsafe ferry operation due to corruption is unsurprising to me.  This is the country that has had bridges and shopping malls collapse in on themselves from shoddy construction caused by corruption and poor safety enforcement.  The Park administration was just a continuation of the status quo.

Here is where Ms. Kim continues on with another well known narrative about President Park’s missing seven hours during the Sewol Ferry Boat disaster:

South Korea is one of the most digitally connected nations in the world. The horror was witnessed live online by the entire nation, and those trapped teenagers were texting and video chatting their parents until their final seconds. In those desperate hours, however, Park was nowhere to be found, and no statement was issued by the Blue House until the president finally appeared in public, seven hours after the accident happened, looking dazed and clueless as she asked, “Why is it so hard to find the students if they are wearing life jackets?” Everyone had drowned hours ago.

Remember Ms. Kim wrote this back in December 2016 when the established narrative had already been established about President Park and the Sewol disaster.  Media speculation said she was having botox treatments or even an affair during the missing seven hours.  An investigation conducted by the Moon administration after taking office disclosed the timeline of events involving President Park.

By the time she found out about the accident that morning there was no chance to impact rescue operations.  If a rescue was going to happen it had to happen by the first responders from the ROK Coast Guard. The Coast Guard office in Mokpo immediately sent a vessel to the accident site after receiving emergency phone calls from passengers.  The vessel arrived at the scene before the sinking, but did not order the passengers to evacuate.  An immediate evacuation and rescue by the Coast Guard would have saved many of the passengers.

This was incompetence by the ROK Coast Guard commander on the scene who was clearly unprepared to deal with such an accident and not something Park Geun-hye was going to be able to resolve in the few minutes she had from the Blue House.  If people want to criticize her for lax government regulations that allowed the overweight ferry to operate and the poor disaster response by the Coast Guard I think that is fair.  However, to claim she could have personally did something to save those people that morning, but instead hung out in her bedroom is completely unfair in my opinion.

What Park Geun-hye was guilty of was bad optics.  Instead of making a statement that morning, she waited to receive reports on the situation and met with aides and her infamous friend Choi Soon-shil to determine the way ahead on the disaster.  They decided to have Park visit the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters where she made her statement to the country that afternoon.  This created the perception of the seven hour gap which her critics were happy to make things up to fill.  Even after the investigation the optics still wern’t that good because it showed she received reports and met with aides in her bedroom and presidential residence instead of her office at the Blue House.

Ms. Kim continues about the Sewol tragedy:

When the Sewol ferry sank, Lee was one of the first reporters to arrive at the scene and was the last one to leave, more than a month later. As the mainstream media reported that there was a massive rescue team of hundreds of helicopters and ships, Lee reported that there were just two voluntary divers at the scene. A video clip of Lee, at a meeting of victims’ families, shouting at the other reporters for publishing lies and then breaking down in tears went viral.

In regards to poor coverage of the Sewol disaster it would not be surprising to me in the least if the ROK mainstream media was trying to minimize political damage to the Park administration.  Now the complete opposite is happening with the Moon administration consolidating control of the major media outlets to give them favorable coverage instead.

The addictive real-time reporting of the Sewol disaster demonstrated the potential power of independent journalism. Now such journalists are increasingly turning to documentary reporting to engage their audience in an age where films can be made using just a phone. Lee has used this medium expertly. His first film, Diving Bell, about the Sewol tragedy was first released in theaters, then aired on YouTube, and then finally on TV on the eve of the parliament hearing on the Sewol ferry’s sinking. He will soon release a film called The President’s Seven Hours; he was the first to report the claim that during the seven-hour disappearance, Park was under anesthetic in the Blue House, getting a face-lifting, Botox-related injection treatment.

Here is another example of Ms. Kim repeating the established narrative at the time about the botox injections.  The investigation launched by the Moon administration did not find that Park was having botox treatments that morning.  The investigation did find that she was having botox treatments at other times by a doctor not employed by the Blue House.  This doctor was later convicted for lying about the treatments and given a suspended sentence.

As far as independent journalism, that is what Byun Hee-jae has been attempting to do with his reporting about the tablet PC and it got him sent to jail.  Here is the passage where Ms. Kim talks more about JTBC TV:

Among the generally pro-government jongpyun, JTBC TV stands out as the only left-leaning network. The station, which first broke the tablet story and amplified information originated by Joo and Lee, has dominated ratings during the scandal. Since the Sewol tragedy, when it was seen as the only reliable voice among the cable networks, it has also played a critical role in invigorating Korean media.

JTBC may have done better coverage of the initial Sewol tragedy compared to the major media channels, but their later reporting on the tragedy, the tablet PC, as well as the THAAD issue we now know was either sensationalized or not true.

Here is how Ms. Kim concludes her article:

Of course, just as it is always a few bad seeds among politicians who end up taking their country onto a devastating path, it was only a handful of standout journalists who made a difference. But there’s reason to think that others will soon follow their successful example — and hopefully not only in South Korea.

Now we know that in South Korea that independent journalists that do not follow the established narrative will be jailed while in the United States under Donald Trump journalists can regularly publish ubiquitous “fake news” without the fear of being jailed.

In regards to the narrative against President Park, I have to wonder if she would have still been impeached if the public knew of the dubious nature of the tablet PC and the misinformation of the infamous seven hours?  Maybe she still would have been impeached because Choi did have oversized influence in the Park administration and was corrupt, but the conveniently found tablet PC in my opinion seemed to be the key piece of evidence that finally caused the public to widely turn on Park.

I would love to see an American journalist like Suki Kim revisit the whole narrative against President Park.  For example do they still believe JTBC’s claims about the tablet PC?  The one journalist in South Korea who did vigorously report on it was thrown in jail.  I would also like to see what American journalists think about the jailing of Byun Hee-jae.  Do they support his work?  Also does the American media agree with the Moon administration’s use of labor unions to protest and take control of the major media channels?  What about the Druking online opinion rigging scandal linked to the Moon administration?  I have yet to see any major media American journalist comment on any of this; maybe they just prefer to not challenge the established narrative?

ROK Drop favorite Dr. Tara O has another great guest posting up over at One Free Korea that I recommend everyone read.  This time she discusses how the Moon administration has pre-emptively jailed journalist Byun Hee-jae for libel.  Byun has been writing about the infamous tablet PC that ultimately led to the impeachment of former President Park.  In the article Dr. O provides further information about how dubious the tablet PC was:

Park was impeached, and Moon was elected. Unlike what has been written in English, Park was not impeached for corruption or bribery, but for charges that she gave away the “monopoly of state affairs,” and the tablet PC was seen as the “silver bullet.”

The tablet PC turned out to contain no evidence per the special prosecutors’ own forensic report and was not even Choi’s. The tablet PC also did not contain Korean document editing-capable software. The report, however, was not released to the public until a year later, long after the impeachment had concluded and the public fervor had died down.

Sohn stated afterwards that “even if there was no such thing as the [insignificant] tablet PC . . . , [it wouldn’t have mattered]” implying that Park would have been impeached anyway, although it was his TV program that incited people. JTBC, popular among the youth, has made other erroneous claims and sensationalized reporting on the Sewol Ferry sinking, Theater High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD), and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).  [One Free Korea]

I recommend reading the whole article at the link, but a commenter left a link to another article that shows how Byun’s independent journalism site, Media Watch was likely targeted by the Moon administration for libel because of its dogged pursuit of the tablet PC story:

According to Mediawatch.kr, NFS’s forensic report does NOT even mention the name of Choi Soon-sil, much less pinpoint Choi as the user of the tablet PC that JTBC reported was owned and used by Choi.

Na’s testimony should have prompted an avalanche of reports covering this bombshell of a testimony—at least as torrential as those that gushed out of JTBC when it reported that NFS’s forensic report proved JTBC’s claim that Choi was the user of the tablet PC.

Instead, what happened was (1) a deafening silence on the part of JTBC and other MSM outlets, none of which reported this stunning revelation, and (2) the jailing of Byun Hee-jae, the founder of Mediawatch.kr, the only news outlet that has provided an extensive coverage of the testimony.

Mediawatch has doggedly pursued the JTBC’s disingenuous and illegal activities involving the tablet PC. Na’s crucial testimony was covered only by Mediawatch.kr and Jayoo.co.kr, a small internet news outlet which briefly mentioned Na’s testimony in its coverage of the arrest warrant for Byun Hee-jae, and a Youtube channel run by an investigative reporter U Jongchang formerly of Chosun ilbo, who also attended the court proceedings along with Yi Huiu of Mediawatch and Kim Piljun of JTBC.  [Tepyung.com]

Once again I recommend reading the whole thing at the link.

Remember that the actions being taken to silence journalists reporting about the dubious tablet PC is being done in concert with the arrest of Druking, the blogger who helped the Moon administration to manipulate online opinion before the election.  So he has been effectively silenced as well about disclosing any other actions that may have occurred prior to the election to help President Moon get elected.

Once again I wonder if we will ever see the major US media report on any of this?  Probably not they are too busy reporting on more important topics like Roseanne and Samantha Bee.