Kim Hyejin of globalvoicesonline.org has posted a very interesting thread about the current protest over certain laws that are pending in South Korea, regarding broadcasting.
The most important complaint against the pending seven laws are that they would unfairly put the control of TV stations into the hands of the big three newspapers (Joongang, Chosun, and Donga Ilbo) since one effect of the new media reform and deregulation would be to allow companies that have publishing assets to own broadcasting stations (lifting the newspaper-broadcaster cross-ownership ban). This is seen by broadcasting unions as an effort to form an information monopoly that would favor the Chaebols at the expense of any alternative news bias. One should note that with the advent of more modern media like WiBro, large telecommunication companies like Korea Telecom and SK Telecom stand to profit the most from this new legislation and not just newspapers.
The National Union of Media Workers (NUMW), the labor unions of CBS, YTN, KBS and MBC Mad Broadcasting Channel have all decided to strike against the proposed laws for media reform.
While the government advocates the deregulation of the media industry to promote competition, improve quality in broadcasting and streamline how new media (DMB, Wibro, etc.) is regulated, its critics see only the government’s attempt to control media through big business and, considering the plight of modern media in America, such concerns may be justified, indeed.
{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
Elgin my man, are you sure you’re really American?
I didn’t write that stuff “Linkd”. I really hope you are being facetious. It is just one example of some of the concerns *some* Koreans have regarding this pending legislation and is background to this crazy fist-festival we are seeing on TV.
For what it’s worth I think they should be striking too.
How about just saying what you’re saying, because the people who wrote those comments I pasted are looney.
Do you mean that free media necessarily means a better society? A majority of Singaporeans would disagree. Do you mean that concentration of media in the hands of a few companies is necessarily bad? Why so? How do you think media is going to develop in this technological age if you insist on segregating ownership of the news delivery technologies? Do you think it’s ok for citizens in a democracy to start online campaigns to bring the population into the streets and overthrow their own democratically-elected government just a few months after an election? Then why even have elections at all?
They still collect “viewing fee” in Korea. Korean media companies have fatten themselves by getting these fees in addition to advertising revenue.
These companies have become virtually monopolies – by restricting competition.
And, these companies are filled with Rho’s Commies with strong Anti-American and pro-NK(=pro-China) sentiment.
Bust them!!!!
Linkd wants citizens in the US to overthrow Bush, but disapproves of Korean citizens banding to overthrow Lee.
what a hypocrite.
go back to Alberta.
To be accurate only KBS receives the viewing fee. Damn greedy bastards!!!! It always turns my stomach when I see that section in my bills.
Now that I’ve had some sleep, I meanderingly continue:
You’ll have to convince me why this is necessarily unfair. One thing that you get with concentration in an industry is economies of scale. This is important in capital-intensive industries (cars, steel, aircraft), but also in very low margin industries.
Your post makes it obvious that your concern is that people won’t get the hard-hitting, investigative journalism that keeps elites in check and exposes abuses of authority, i.e. news. But news is just content, and these days, consumers demand that their content be FREE. It’s damn hard to compete with free. Who’s going to pay? Sometimes I give the Economist $200 to read them for a year, or $100 to the Financial Times. Sometimes I let that lapse, because even 30 cents a day can seem a rip-off when I can easily find almost the same info on other free websites.
If a newspaper buys a TV station, what’s the big deal? Neither are big money-makers. Currently in Korea, the papers are owned by the chaebol and the networks are owned by the government. Both are elites, both have plenty of things to hide. Neither has a monopoly on information distribution, though. It’s just that people are lazy and don’t dig enough; they take the first pablum that’s thrown at them. Look at the tragic state of CNN out of Atlanta – basically a children’s entertainment network – and why? Because the smart people behind the network found that couch potatos really don’t want to try hard to understand the world. They’d rather see a news clip about a dog hero.
A few days ago, I read on the Joongang site that Ssangyong asked its Chinese parent for a bailout. This interested me, and I don’t trust Korean papers to give a full story, so within 30 seconds I had a Reuter’s site open telling me that they had also asked the Korean government for a bailout, a fact the local papers wanted to keep quiet, apparently. Today, the Korean papers have ‘fessed up to that, too.
These days, owning a newspaper or TV station doesn’t give you the ability to control a nation’s access to information. What is far more a problem in Korea is the quality of journalism. Does this country even HAVE a half-decent school of journalism? It doesn’t seem so.
What newspapers and TV stations do, from a business point of view, is deliver the audience to the advertiser. And the audience, sadly, wants Jessica Simpson and celebrity adoptions and anti-American or anti-Muslim rants. Liberal revolutionaries such as yourself see this as a real shame, and with to force the masses clockwork-orange style to wake up and see what is really going on, thinking it’s a right-wing conspiracy that keeps people on the couch. But that’s not true. It’s only lazy human nature that keeps people on the couch. There are also plenty of right-wingers who have their own agendas they would like to force people to wake up and pay attention to (sarcasm on) if only they could get control of the media.
Korea is admittedly disadvantaged due to its linguistic isolation from the rest of the world. Hardly anyone here has the option of searching the Internet for news and information in any language besides Korean. And the information they do have access to is pretty poor by developed nation standards. But that’s not going to be solved by legislating ownership restrictions. That can only be solved by educating the people themselves. Korea has a very active citizen journalism culture – it’s just that the citizen journalists are as dimwitted as their readers, and as unenlightened on what constitutes logical thought and true journalism.
I agree your last two posts, Linkd, with the exception this comment:
Time magazine is written at about an 8th grade reading level as are most other national mass media publications. CNN has even started prefacing its brief stories with Cliff’s Notes-like bulleted points listing the main ideas. My Korean reading ability is no higher than middle school level, yet I manage to sift through Korean news content. My Chinese reading skills are about 4th grade level; with the aid of a dictionary, I can access online content. College-educated Koreans have sufficient reading proficiency to comprehend international English-language news content; however, most probably elect not to, unless they’re trying to improve their English.
…exception of…
I’ll give you that. I guess I mean that hardly anyone has the ability to skim through the web and gather information at the speed of news. Certainly many Koreans can get through an English news article with sufficient time and a good dictionary. Being in the translation biz, though, and as I’m sure you know, too, reading the straight facts is way different from understanding tone and implication.
BTW, the Hole’s site meter will probably hit 5 million later today. Is there some sort of standard blogosphere way to celebrate?
It’s a silly debate, anyway, about the newspapers being able to purchase and control broadcast media. Both newsprint and broadcast are dead in America, and I can’t imagine that Korea will somehow be immune from the tectonic shift taking place elsewhere. The newspapers see a move into broadcasting as a survival gambit, but it’s the shortest of short-term plays — like the Lusitania sailing to the rescue of the Titanic.
Dokdo and the grammar of pronouns getting dozens of comments in other threads and you call THIS a silly debate?
Linkd,
Economics aside, one problem with your position is that you’re assuming everyone else has the skills, equipment and motivation (and language skills) to go and do their own digging. Most people don’t; it may in part be lazy human nature, but that doesn’t change the fact that media concentrated in the hands of a self-serving few is unhealthy in a democracy, for a number of reasons.
I did a major presentation on this at uni (BA journalism), and basically examined and compared the quality of news content in a city that went from two seperatly owned papers to just one owner. (This was Brisbane; I had to go back and study hours and hours of archived papers). Within a few months of the Courier Mail (Murdoch) getting a monopoly, content changed drastically; not long after the second Murdoch paper dissapeared. Aside from a sprinkling of shite local news, the paper started parroting press releases and basically trimming back on the sort of stuff that it had needed to stay competitive before. It also began to look very similar to the other Murdoch-owned papers around the country, to the point where it was a waste of time buying the national rag (Australian) and the local one, since you’d just get the same rubbish.
Bias became a problem too. I compared about 4 issues that I thought were important to the owners of the largest media proprieters in th country. All of them reported on the issues quite differently, and with a clear bent. The Murdoch papers were very pro-conservative, Fairfax less so; IMO it had a significant impact on how voters perceived certain parties and leaders to the point that democracy was not served as well as it could have been.
Quality suffers when ownership is concentrated, but so does objectivity. The GNP is pushing for the media laws to get changed for a reason, and that reason isn’t good for a healthy democratic system, particular one as new and frail as Korea’s.
Pointing out the shortfalls of the readership and the journlists in Korea is important, but it doesn’t change the fact that they still deserve several strong independent sources of news to present stories objectively, particularly regarding the Chaebols and the GDP.
Quality suffers when companies are protected from the consequences of their mistakes (see the US auto industry, for example). Competition can be fierce in a concentrated industry (Coke and Pepsi, Boeing and Airbus), or it can settle into a cozy cartel (the Big 3 accounting firms, OPEC). Each industry has its peculiar characteristics.
I don’t know about your example, but maybe go back and see where things are at now. You looked at the unstable period of a few months following a serious industry disruption. Maybe what happened is that Murdoch actually WANTED to pare down the paper, shed a lot of departments and focus just on morning commuter readers, and maybe the financials of such a decision were entirely reasonable.
Also, keep in mind that a broadsheet newspaper is one slice of the average person’s pie chart of news. If the newspaper starts to suck, that slice will decrease, and some other channel will grow.
Also, I think it is perfectly reasonable for papers to have an editorial slant, so long as it’s up-front about it. Just about any city in the West (at least, back when I lived in the West) offered a choice of a left paper or a right paper.
This is an objective and factual statement: 3 people died today in a gas explosion at Acme’s New Jersey plant. But this isn’t a story.
One good, honest reporter from the leftie paper will go out and talk to Acme workers and learn how the company ordered, but did not install, some safety equipment. It still sits in the warehouse.
Another good, honest reporter from a rightie paper will go out and talk to industry executives and learn how a barrage of contradictory regulations from the government have created confusion, and plants have been going nuts trying to retool to satisfy standards that even public safety inspectors can’t understand.
Both are valid. Most people read the news they agree with. That’s what people are like.
What does this even mean? What do you mean “deserve”? From who? The government, like the BBC? Or businessmen, like Murdoch? Nobody “deserves” anything that someone else must provide them at cost to themselves. What do you mean by “strong and independent”? Can you give me an example of any such news organization on earth? Is the NYT strong and independent? Is Fox? Would either have a large audience if they didn’t have a bias?
I’m curious to learn how you reconcile this statement with your previously-expressed approval of most liberal and socialist government actions, and the Smart Guy.
That’s pretty straightforward, although this may strike you as semantic:
To say that someone deserves something is necessarily to say that someone else has an obligation to provide it. In my philosophy of how the world should work, obligations must be kept to the bare abstract minimum – security of person, equality before the law, etc. because anything else carries a real danger of creating a monster that consumes resources while not fulfilling its purpose (health care systems are always a favorite example).
IF a society has reached a certain sustainable level of wealth and has discussed the matter and chooses to codify some RIGHT, saying that every member ‘deserves’ something, such as standard education through Grade 12, then that’s fine. But by identifying that right, you must also identify who then has the obligation to provide it. This is usually the state, which then embarks on a perilous journey that may or may not end up with satisfactory universal education for all, and may or may not end up spending resources efficiently on this obligation, and may or may not gather those resources through a tax system that people generally agree is fair, etc.
It seems like a no-brainer to offer guaranteed rights that everyone ‘deserves’. But it really means opening up a whole pandora’s box of potential hurtin’ down the line, and should be undertaken with great care; that is, conservatively.
Finally, your perception that I am a socialist leftie, I think, comes from my previous strong anti-Bush comments. Those stemmed from my opposition to (1)rule by the stupid and (2)rule by ideology. Being anti-Bush does not make one a socialist.
By independent, I mean, independent of each other.
By deserve, I mean that in a healthy democracy, an elected government owes it to the electorate to make sure that the local media serves the public interest, and not just the interest of a small cadre, private or governmental.
By strong, I mean local zines don’t count.
As it happens, oftentimes it makes economic sense for media conglomerates to consolodate and downsize. This is inevitable in all industries, but the media is unique in that such changes can have a radical and adverse impact on democracy itself. That’s why most healthy democracies have laws governing how much media a single entity can own; the purpose of these laws is to ensure there is a diversity of information available for public consumption. Don’t like those laws? Visit Russia.
There are other points, too, such as the potential for slower innovation, increased prices, a lack of voice for minority groups, etc, though these are all highly debatable.
As for: Nobody “deserves” anything that someone else must provide them at cost to themselves.
Well, we’re arguing a whole new point now; whether or not the government should fund or subsidize any particular media.
Just for the hell of it: my personal opinion is that a certain amount of money should be spent by the government for, say, a public broadcaster. I know alot of people North Americans will disagree, but my favorite channels in Australia were public, ie, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and SBS.
They weren’t (aren’t) beholden to private interests or entirely motivated by ratings/profit, the result being
1. There were no ads.
2. Minority issues were covered.
3. Small rural communites were better served.
4. Education, documentaries, intelligent in-depth news. People actually learn shit when they watch the abc.
3. They weren’t afraid to criticise big business, since they weren’t at risk of having ads pulled and revenue gouged.
4. They weren’t afraid to call out the commercial media when they’d done something stupid for the sake of profits (example 1: a journo managed to get onto the phone with a guy who was holding a hostage in a farmstead to ask him inflamatory questions, putting the hostages at risk. Example 2: inflamatory, sensational coverage of Cronulla riots/racial tensions in Sydeny which exasperated the situations).
5. They take risks, because it doesn’t necessarily matter if they fail: the result, innovation in broadcasting. In many ways the abc has proved a testing ground and a feeder for other stations exactly because of this.
I’m not saying public broadcasters should ever replace private ones, but I think at least one public channel is a good idea. Just my opinion. (Also the opinion of the majority back home. If the people decided they weren’t worth the cost from the public purse, the government would act on a mandate and get rid of them.)
Newspapers are dying, therefore it doesn’t matter who owns them. Next.
That opinion is perfectly valid. You can find examples around the world of high-quality journalism from public-sector organizations; and the same for postal delivery, health care, daycare, primary education, phone service, etc. You can also find bad ones, and really bad ones. I think there are lots of times when public spending, even very high public spending such as is going on in the US right now, is a good thing. I am just very wary about institutionalizing that spending as part of the delivery of ‘rights’. Once a right is established, it can never be taken away.
Something about your own presentation that bothers me, though, is the strong tone of ideology about it, and since you studied journalism and therefore know how to write, it is obviously intentional. The TV station you refer to may well be exemplary, but I’m sure if I looked online I would find valid criticism of it.
Your tone implies that every criticism of a corporation is valid, that stupidity is the sole realm of the commercial media, that civil servants are the source of innovation, that everything a public broadcaster does is good.
How would you feel if you were a business owner with a 30-year history of paying taxes, contributing to your community, providing employment for dozens of workers, and one day you turn on the TV and are shocked to find the respected public broadcaster is smearing your company?
How would you feel as a member of the taxpaying public to find that your public broadcaster’s slant on global warming just took a 180 shift, coincident with a change in government after an election?
How would you feel if you found out that your public broadcaster took 350 man hours of labor at $45 per hour to produce 1 hour of airable content, but the private sector could do it in half the time at 60% the cost? In the business world, this would get solved pretty quickly. It’s not so easy for a government to fix a public-sector organization.
Your tone implies that every criticism of a corporation is valid, that stupidity is the sole realm of the commercial media, that civil servants are the source of innovation, that everything a public broadcaster does is good.
My tone implies all that?
Linkd, I’m a capitalist. I believe in private enterprise. My father was a businessman. But I also believe in a certain amount of public spending for the public good and a certain amount of regulation. That’s all.
Have to agree with Linkd: “Korea has a very active citizen journalism culture – it’s just that the citizen journalists are as dimwitted as their readers, and as unenlightened on what constitutes logical thought and true journalism.”
There is no journalism without professionalism, hence “citizen journalist” is an oxymoron. The utterly laughable ohmynews demonstrates this on an ongoing basis.
Unfortunately, even the professionals are getting crappier.
Hojusaram has a good point about nonprofit journalism being a viable news source as the margins for media evaporate. There are alternatives to gov’t support for this as well, such as a trust or cooperative, examples of which include the Christian Science Monitor and AP.
I’m not sure what route Korea should go, though, since the gov’t here is so partisan and incompetent.
I generally agree with what Linkd wrote, except that “the local papers wanted to keep quiet,” about the bailout request by Ssangyong Motors to the Korean government Why would they have wanted to keep quiet about it?
About a week ago the local papers reported that the vice chairman or some senior figure from SAIC, the parent company of Ssangyong, flew to Seoul and met with the Finance Ministry officials. Although the papers didn’t say he requested it, a reasonable reader would have assumed it was quite likely that he would have requested some form of bailout. Why else would he have wanted to meet them?
Regarding the deteriorating quality of media contents, it has been developing for quite some time in America, but it doesn’t seem quite apparent in other parts of the world yet, although I think many other countries in the West would likely follow sooner or later.
Time magazine used to be a leading authoritative paper, but it has now lost to other papers such as The Economist.
A few days after Anna Nicole Smith died in 2007, Korea and America agreed on the free trade, but the next morning none of the three major American TV networks’ breakfast shows mentioned the news while they all kept talking about Nicole Smith every 15 minutes. I would think that if the other country of the agreement was UK, Canada or Australia, they would have reported it on the news next morning. But do Americans know why their media is in such a condition? I don’t think it has been like that all the time in America. I think it has been a gradual development over quite some time, but in recent years in a more visible way.
I agree completely with “barbarian” regarding the poor quality of media news in the U.S. Putting media control into the hands of a few companies has resulted in the most puerile form of news and entertainment. I quit watching that stuff some years ago because it is so bad. If the quality of media in Korea follows that path, the results will be predictably poor. There is also the issue of censorship by simply not reporting on events, which has happened more times than not in Korea.
At the very least, these bills should be scrutinized just so as to avoid the fate of American media; an example that is not worthy of emulation.
You must log in to post a comment.