Rep. Kim Young-sun |
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
Newspapers for years have felt helpless over the expanding influence of Internet sites like Naver and Daum with readers showing an increasing preference to read news stories on their computers.
Now a lawmaker from the ruling Grand National Party (GNP) is suggesting that the Internet portals be regulated under the same media law that governs their print counterparts, adding another twist to the ongoing battle of ink versus electron.
The GNP move is backed by many of the country's conservative newspapers, including the ``Big Three" of the Chosun Ilbo, JoongAng Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo, which lead the country in circulation and have been most vocal in calls for regulating Web portals.
Rep. Kim Young-sun caused controversy Monday when she proposed a draft bill stating that an Internet site using news stories for more than 50 percent of its content on the main page should be regulated as a media outlet.
However, the proposal also includes a provision that prevents Web portals from publishing news stories and providing news search services at all when failing to dedicate at least half of its main page content to news stories.
To put it simply, Kim is saying that Internet sites providing anything more than a weather update should be categorized as journalism organizations and be held accountable as such.
``Internet portals are virtually functioning as media outlets, but have not been enforced with the same responsibilities as traditional journalism organizations," Kim said.
Kim first proposed the bill last year, but discussions in the National Assembly drifted astray. However, GNP lawmakers are now more serious about pressing the issue forward, with online discussion forums, such as Daum's Agora, and Weblogs providing the seedbed for anti-government critics following the controversy over the resumption of U.S. beef imports.
It remains to be seen whether Kim, and her other GNP colleagues such as Shim Jae-chul, Kwon Young-se and Jin Seong-how who are backing the bill, can find a strong-enough logic to survive what looks to be a heated debate in the National Assembly.
It's hard to deny the increasing role of Internet sites in the shaping of public opinion, but regulating them as media outlets could be a stretch when most of them don't write their own stories.
And it's unclear how the 50-percent threshold would be determined, whether judged by the number of news stories to the total number of articles on the main page or simply the size of the news section itself.
thkim@koreatimes.co.kr
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