Former State Department official Robert Carlin must have been surprised to see his essay—a hypothetical speech emulating DPRK First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju to a meeting of North Korean diplomats—translated and reported as an actual speech.
This made a lot of papers—including Yonhap, the Dong-A Ilbo and Chosun Ilbo—look really, really bad. The Dong-A put in on its front page, while the Chosun ran a special report on it.
Over at OhMyNews, former Media Today executive editor Kim Jong-bae looks at how such a thing could have occurred. Of particular interest to us, he points out that Korean dailies have a nasty tendency to report “opinions” of American “North Korea experts”—usually former State of Defense Department officials—as facts. He noted that the United States is a party to the North Korea conflict, and that comments and facts coming from the United States need to be verified. Korean media, however, treat comments by anonymous officials and opinions from ex-officials as major news, and this was problematic.
For the record, I happened to agree with Kim’s criticism.
Not to rain on OhMyNews‘ parade, however, but Kim needn’t have looked any further than Korea’s most influential online paper for examples. On one occasion at least, OhMyNews didn’t even need an anonymous U.S. official to say anything—in March 2003, the online paper ran a major report that a high-ranking Bush administration official had sounded out a nameless Korean official (who ended up being Vice Premier Kim Jin-pyo) about bombing North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear complex. The vice premier admitted a couple of days later that it was he who made the comments, but he was quoting think tank KIEP head Joseph Winder, not a high-ranking Bush administration figure. Winder himself said his comments to Kim didn’t reflect official U.S. policy, but OhMyNews still refused to run a correction, instead penning not only a very arrogant (IMHO) position statement (citing the U.S. media, something they’d slam the Chosun Ilbo for if they did the same), but also two other pieces quoting a U.S. Korea expert (in this case, Bruce Cumings, who I’ll admit is a legitimate Korea expert) and a Korean paster quoting a nameless third person to prove that the evil Bush people had conveyed their nefarious scheme to bomb Yongbyon to the Korean side through several channels. Although in OhMyNews‘ defense, somewhere between translating the New York Times and bashing the Bush administration, the paper did claim in their position statement that the minister named in their original piece did say the things they said he did. Or at least I think that’s what they wanted to say—read it again.
I only mention this in passing because OhMyNews, as much as I respect it as a news agency, a world leader in the field of online media and a welcome alternative in the Korean media scene—occasionally forgets that its own shit does in fact smell. If you read Korean, spend some time comparing the (conservative) media gangbang on OhMyNews in 2003 with the shit the progressive press is dishing out in regards to the Kang Sok Ju non-speech—you could learn a lot.
3 Comments
Ah, the Korean media…even the sports announcers here yell “gooooaaalll” before the ball gets near the net. They’re premature speculators
And yes, sarcasm tends to fall flat on the peninsula. Guys dressed in drag are a perennial laugh riot, though.
That’s quite rich — Oh My News complaining about journalistic standards.
Though not quite as bad as the utter lack of fact checking is making sure numbers are correct. I was editing a translated article at work the other day and learned that a prominent American company had 3.5 trillion USD in profits last year. As this is about a quarter of the GDP of the United Stated I referred back to the Korean article. Sure enough it said 3조5천언 달러. After doing a bit of research on my own, I found that the company’s profit for last year was a mere 5.6 billion dollars. I still have no idea how the reporter came up with the 3.5 trillion dollar number.