The Hankyoreh (Korean) comments on something that personally I’ve found quite annoying about the manner in which the Korean press has covered the Korean hostage situation in Afghanistan.
Namely, the Korean press has done very little actual journalism work. Instead, it has concentrated on translating foreign press reports.
If you’ve been reading the Korean press, I’m not telling anything you didn’t already know. Most of the reports we’re getting here are no different from blog posts — “AP reported this,” and “The New York Times reported that.”
All that’s missing are the hyperlinks.
Ordinarily, I might chalk this up to a combination of laziness and journalistic sadaejuui, but reading the Hankyoreh piece, there’s more to it. The Foreign Ministry has apparently banned Korean reporters from going to Afghanistan for security reasons. A Foreign Ministry official told the Hankyoreh, “The situation on the ground in Afghanistan is very serious, the government cannot guarantee the security of press teams, and the press teams of all nations are becoming major kidnapping targets.” He added, “If something happens to a reporter while he’s covering a story on the ground, the government has to take responsibility, so we aren’t permitting local coverage.”
The situation has pissed off the Korean Journalists Association, which in the latest issue of its magazine ran an editorial calling on the government to stop blocking reporters from going to Afghanistan. In particular, the association found it quite embarrassing that the Korean press was relying exclusively on the foreign press for reports on the Korean hostage situation.
Another problem is that compared to the press of other countries, the Korean press apparently lacks reporters trained to work in hot zones, leading an official with a group for press reform to express hope to the Hani that the Afghan hostage crisis might prove an opportunity for the media to patch up this gap in their journalistic capabilities.
On a related note, freelance journalist Kang Kyung-ran contributed a piece (translated into English) to the Hankyoreh on the Afghan hostage situation and the Korean press.
6 Comments
South Korean media were a very big part of the problem in the 2002 schoolgirl deaths and they weren’t exactly stellar on Virginia Tech this past April. Although I do not approve of the government banning domestic media travel to Afghanistan, maybe it’s a blessing that coverage of this crisis is being left to third parties.
Bingo.
Journalists, but not hostages.
Kevin
So where was this strong talk from the Foreign Ministry before the hostage crisis began? It seems like if they could ban one group (reporters) from going to Afghanistan, they could just as easily have banned another group (
missionariesaid workers) from going. Or is the press just impotent and scared of the government enough to actually listen to them? So much for the myth of an independent press…Word up: inter-Korean summit was announced for later this month.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters.....ref=slogin
This makes perfect sense: They’ve already outsourced responsibility for the resolution of this crisis (to Karzai and Bush), why not outsource the news coverage as well?
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[...] Afghan hostage crisis vexes South Korean Press, Hankyoreh, 7 August 2007 (see also the Marmot) [...]