South Korean president takes aim at ‘fake news’
But advocates for a free press say his vow to keep reporters honest is a pretext to intimidate his critics.
SEOUL — When police showed up last year at Im Hyun-ju’s home in Seoul with a search warrant, the 43-year-old journalist watched in disbelief as they examined old notebooks, rifled through her bedroom and confiscated her phone and laptop.
An officer explained that she was under investigation for giving a colleague leaked documents about the justice minister, including personal records from his confirmation hearing.
“Frankly, I was angry,” Im wrote in an essay. “What was the reason for coming into my home where my family lives, humiliating me by digging through my underwear drawer?”
Many saw the raid as part of the government’s ongoing attack on her employer, the public broadcaster MBC, over what President Yoon Suk-yeol routinely terms “fake news.”
Capitalizing on growing mistrust in the media, Yoon has made combating disinformation a centerpiece of his agenda. But free press advocates say his vow to keep reporters honest is a pretext to intimidate his critics.
His allies have filed at least 25 criminal complaints against journalists and media organizations over the last two years — allegations include defamation and stalking — and authorities have raided at least six newsrooms or reporters’ homes.
At least one journalist has been indicted on defamation charges for a story about the justice minister that turned out to have major inaccuracies. That case, like most of the others, has yet to go to trial.
“The only explanation I can think of for why I was raided is that the administration is trying to scare us into submission,” Im said.
As in the U.S. and other countries, many in South Korea are shunning traditional news sources. A recent poll found that 53% of South Koreans get news through YouTube, which has become a hotbed of political extremism and conspiracy theories.
“Because the public is increasingly rejecting neutral and fair reporting, those who are trying to do this kind of high-quality journalism are losing ground,” said Shim Seog-tae, a journalism professor at Semyung University.
That became clear during the 2022 presidential election, which featured news coverage that strained the boundaries of journalistic impartiality and rigor. In the run-up to the vote, conservative newspapers spread claims — later proved to be false — that Yoon’s opponent had received bribes from a local criminal organization.
Then the investigative outlet Newstapa ran a story that suggested Yoon had helped bury a banking and real estate scandal when he was a prosecutor — a report that was later found to have significant journalistic defects, including misleading editing of a transcript and an undisclosed financial relationship between the stringer and his source.
After Yoon took power — his first time in elected office — prosecutors created an election conspiracy task force and raided the newsrooms of Newstapa and JTBC, an outlet that cited the report, as well as the homes of two journalists.
A breaking point in Yoon’s relationship with the press came in New York in September 2022, during a conference for the Global Fund, a financing body created to fight HIV and other diseases in developing countries.
Unaware that his microphone was on, Yoon appeared to tell his aides: “It’s going to be embarrassing for [President] Biden if those pricks at the National Assembly don’t approve this bill.”
MBC reported that he was referring to the U.S. Congress and the fact that it would have to approve Biden’s $6-million pledge to the fund. But Yoon’s administration said that journalists had misheard the word “Biden” and that Yoon was talking about the South Korean National Assembly.
Yoon fumed that the report threatened national security and accused the broadcaster of “maliciously using fake news to drive a wedge in U.S.-South Korea relations.”
His office proceeded to ban MBC from the presidential plane on a trip to Southeast Asia. More significant, the broadcaster has been subject to investigations by the Labor Ministry and the National Tax Service, while the Korea Communications Standards Commission has fined it at least three times on disinformation grounds. Viewed by many as retaliatory, two of the fines have been suspended in court.
The head of the commission, appointed by Yoon, has expanded the panel’s authority over illegal online content such as gambling or pornography to include the murkier realm of “fake news.” The highly controversial move has included experiments in attaching labels to online stories indicating when they are under review for disinformation.
Shim, the journalism professor, noted that Yoon, a conservative, is not the first president to crack down on the press. Under his liberal predecessor, Moon Jae-in, the ruling party attempted to pass a law that would have subjected journalists to punitive damage claims.
What’s new is the scale of the offensive.
“If previous administrations attempted to control the media with surgical precision, the Yoon administration is hacking away with an ax,” Shim said. “The entire government has been mobilized to this end.”
In January, the court ordered MBC to comply with a demand from the Foreign Ministry that the broadcaster issue a correction to its reporting on the hot-mic incident, drawing on expert analysis noting that it was unclear whether Yoon had uttered the word “Biden.” MBC has appealed the ruling.
“I don’t think technical analyses are necessarily the answer in these situations,” said Lee Ki-ju, 45, one of the journalists behind the story. “I stand by our reporting and think it was well within the realm of common sense and standard journalistic practice.”
Lawmakers also filed defamation complaints against Lee and three other MBC journalists. In addition, Lee is being investigated for obstruction of official proceedings on the basis that the report compromised the president’s diplomatic efforts.
“I’ve received several summons from the police, but I’ve been refusing to attend, because I think it’s unjust,” said Lee, who has been the target of an online death threat for publicly clashing with the president.
At a closed-door meeting with a group of reporters last month, Hwang Sang-moo, a senior presidential secretary for civil and social affairs, said, “Listen up, MBC” before recounting an infamous story from 1988 about a journalist who was stabbed in the thigh with a sashimi knife by soldiers after writing a piece critical of the military.
Hwang claimed he was joking but later resigned.
“Government officials in this day and age wouldn’t go that far themselves, but I was worried that a fanatical supporter might interpret it as a message to carry out an attack,” Lee said.
MBC’s union has decried the government’s crackdown as “excessive investigations” that unfairly target the broadcaster.
Legal experts have warned that government attempts to police the truthfulness of news reports overstep judicial processes and endanger freedom of expression, a constitutional right that has existed since 1948 and weathered decades of military dictatorships.
Citing the “undermining of freedom of expression,” Swedish watchdog V-Dem Institute wrote this year in its annual “Democracy Report” that South Korea is in “an episode of autocratization.” In the institute’s democracy index, South Korea’s ranking has dropped from 28th to 47th.
At the third Summit for Democracy — a Biden-led global effort to counter growing global authoritarianism, hosted last month in Seoul — Yoon held firm.
Accusing “certain actors and groups” of undermining democracy with lies, the South Korean president put forward his solution: legal investigations and harsher punishments.