南韓總統在任期最後八個月，仍以不斷惹出爭議來證明自己不是跛腳鴨。
South Korean leader targets media privileges
By Choe Sang-Hun
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
SEOUL: With just eight months left in office, President Roh Moo Hyun of South Korea is no lame duck.
Despite dwindling approval ratings in the twilight of his rule, political analysts say, the 60-year-old politician has found a surefire way of keeping himself in the national limelight: by picking fights.
Roh is no stranger to confrontation. First, he riled his conservative adversaries by distancing South Korea from U.S. foreign policy. He then infuriated his liberal supporters by negotiating a free trade agreement with Washington. He even attempted to move the capital out of Seoul, where business leaders and their political allies have huge real-estate investments, but was rebuffed by the South Korean Constitutional Court.
Now, Roh has taken on what he considers the last of his country’s "privileged classes" - the news media, which the president claims cranks out the "most defective product" in South Korea.
"I feel good today," Roh said Saturday as he heaped scorn and criticism on the media during a four-hour lecture in an auditorium packed with 900 supporters chanting his name. "But can you imagine what ferocious headlines we will see tomorrow?"
This week, newspapers responded with unkind quotes from opposition leaders, some of whom likened Roh to Hitler or the despotic and incompetent Roman emperor Nero. After dedicating three pages to unfavorable coverage of Roh, the mass-circulation daily JoongAng suggested in its editorial Monday that the nation just ignore the president and "leave him ranting alone."
Roh’s relationship with major Korean newspapers has been marked by unprecedented vitriol and daily recriminations, but few have panicked at the uproar.
Instead, observers say, the mudslinging is a sign of how far South Korea has come from the military rule of the 1980s and before, when the government used tax investigations to intimidate news organizations that strayed too far from the official perspective. Back then, the South Korean Information Ministry issued daily "reporting guidelines" with suggestions as detailed as the size of headlines.
South Korea is now one of the most uninhibited Asian democracies, where editorials in newspapers routinely call the president "psychotic."
On May 22, Roh escalated the conflict by announcing that he would abolish a time-honored tradition - or an entrenched vice, according to Roh - of South Korean journalism: Dozens of offices set aside for journalists in government agencies.
Roh plans to close down most of them by August and consolidate them into a few news conference rooms open to all media. The government will supplement the new system with "e-briefings" that will allow journalists to watch the briefings online or ask questions through government Web sites.
The reporters’s rooms were established during the Japanese colonial rule which ended in 1945. Since then, these rooms, known as kijashil, have been a fixture in every major government agency, from powerful ministries to large police precincts. Journalists from major publications ran the rooms like private clubs, doling out memberships, desk space and access to sources, although reporters now say such practices are a thing of the past.
Supporters say the rooms ensure journalists quick access to government sources and symbolize the watchdog status of the media. But the system has also been criticized as spawning an unethical coziness between journalists and their government sources, while allowing the major media to stifle emerging competition from new, often Internet-based, news outlets.
After Roh opened government press briefings to small newspapers and Internet news sites, he said the established media began obstructing the news gathering process to defend their oligopolistic power.
In 2004, a cabinet minister was forced to cancel an interview with an Internet newspaper when the regulars at his ministry’s press room protested, Roh’s office said.
Foreign media are routinely barred from the reporters’s rooms for "the sake of national interest," while domestic journalists receive exclusive background briefings from the authorities.
"Is there press freedom in the reporters’s rooms? There is only control, collusion and excessive privilege there," Roh said Saturday. "The people’s right to know is satisfied not when you take government dictation, but when you do some leg work."
But critics said Roh’s program to remove the media from government facilities will effectively destroy its ability to monitor the public interest, and differs little from the outright suppression that military dictators exercised in the past. The critics have called the move a retaliation inspired by Roh’s "morbid hatred of media" - especially the three mass-circulation, conservative dailies Chosun, JoongAng and Dong-A, which excoriate the president on a daily basis.
"The government is just trying to keep information it does not want to disclose from leaking out," said a statement adopted last Thursday by 37 of the 39 Seoul-based member publications of the Journalists Association of Korea. In a survey funded by the association, nearly 91 percent of domestic journalists opposed Roh’s plan to close down the reporters’s rooms.
Roh’s policy "has the stench of the president’s raw sentiment against the media," said the National Union of Media Workers, a liberal group that has often supported Roh’s policies. "He hates both the major, conservative media and the small, progressive media. He always makes it clear that only the government mouthpiece is fair and accurate."
Under Roh, government agencies have filed more complaints to the Press Arbitration Commission than they did during the three previous administrations combined.
Roh, a self-taught human rights lawyer who reportedly writes his own speeches, was elected to a five-year term in late 2002, riding a wave of demands for change from a population frustrated with the traditional political order, which was marked by crippling regional rivalries, authoritarian party bosses and Cold War hostility toward North Korea. Corruption scandals also undermined the people’s tolerance of the powerful South Korean businesses conglomerates, the chaebol.
"Roh considers it his historic duty to demolish the nation’s establishment," said Jaung Hoon, a political science professor at Chung Ang University. "He sees the conservative media as the last symbol of the old rule."
Since Roh took office, charges of corrupt links between the government, politicians and businesses have dwindled. But Roh’s anti-elitist attacks, and the equally virulent rejoinders of his detractors, have transformed the South Korean political environment into something of a free-for-all.
Conservative newspapers and civic groups fulminate against Roh’s "vulgar language" and "undignified" character. Roh, accusing his establishment critics of "bashing an unwelcome outsider," hurls invective at seemingly every opportunity.
"He is the most difficult to understand among South Korean presidents. He has made many proud and many embarrassed," said Yim Dong Wook, a political scientist at Chungju National University. "He has been crossing the ideological line back and forth, attacking everyone in his way, be they conservative or liberal."
That tactic has kept Roh at the center of attention during this election year, although he is barred by Constitution from running again in the December.
His media plan has already emerged as a major election issue. Two leading presidential candidates, both affiliated with the conservative opposition, vowed to reinstate the reporters’s rooms if elected. Roh called them cowards who "fawn" over big media bosses.
When Roh took the podium Saturday, he attacked all major presidential hopefuls, both conservative and liberal.
Electing Park Geun Hye, a major opposition candidate and daughter of a late military strongman, Park Chung Hee, would be an embarrassment to South Korea, Roh said. The leading opposition candidate, Lee Myung Bak is "out of his mind," Roh said.
Roh even took aim at two of his former cabinet ministers - Chung Dong Young and Kim Geun Tae - who have distanced themselves from the unpopular president in hopes of representing the liberal forces in the December election.
The president, called them "inexperienced," and said he once wondered whether he had been foolish to hire them as ministers in the first place.
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