By Michael Breen
Prime Minister Han Seung-soo took issue this week with negative predictions about Korea in The Economist and The Financial Times and ordered the Cabinet to better explain the country's economic situation to the international press.
In doing so, he was right to assume that Korea could explain itself better. But this has always been a problem and it's not likely to be solved by a simple instruction to improve. In fact, this solution has as much chance of success as ordering a sullen teenager to cheer up. What you don't realize is that the kid is miserable in the first place because you're always issuing orders.
Before taking action, I would recommend the prime minister spend a day posing as a foreign reporter. He should try calling up ministries and conglomerates for information and request interviews with senior people. Note how officials never seem to ``own" their policy ideas, as if they were instantly changeable in the face of local press criticism. Note your own impression of uncertainty about what you are being told, unless it's tangible like a nut and bolt. And note your reliance on outside experts who you trust to help you sift through the crap and make sense of it all.
This should be followed with a day at the PR department of one of your government ministries. Note your colleagues are smart, but unmotivated. Note they don't want to be in the department because every idiot from the minister down blames them for negative coverage as if it's their fault. Note how you are instructed to put out fires started by other people, without adequate equipment, and how your senior officials run for the air-raid shelter when you tell them The Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal has called.
Note also the storm created by that instruction from you, the prime minister, to ``improve PR." See how it blew through the corridor and settles on the most junior official who had to spend his weekend coming up with a list of action points that the minister can report to you, regardless of whether they actually get implemented or not.
Then you will appreciate that dumping more work on people won't solve this one. What you need is a strategic overhaul.
That should begin with an attitude change. The first thing to appreciate is that we live in a world of ideas that get expressed in words. Democracy is about policies and persuasion and if Korea's leaders aren't out there arguing and explaining, other people, such as their critics, are doing it for them.
It is also important to understand where the foreign press, or any press, is coming from. Last year, senior government officials directly accused reporters from the Financial Times and The Times of writing negative predictions about the Korean economy out of British anger over HSBC's thwarted bid to buy Korea Exchange Bank. British bank, British media. Get it? Memo to Korea: reporters only support their country in times of war, and not always then. You and Japan are the only countries in the world that consider economics to be warfare by another means. In short, the HSBC story is just another story for British reporters.
Officials must mentally emigrate from the world of nutty conspiracies to the land of public debate.
The other key change necessary to improve communications with the press is to drop the fiction of any real difference between local and foreign media. The Korean press is also unconvinced by government action.
Again, the reason is poor explanation, not by the bureaucracy, but by the top leadership. It's no good sending out aides. We, the people, want to hear from the leaders. The reason for the low level of trust in government domestically is that senior officials don't debate in public. To put it more rudely, most of them are intellectual cowards who lack the substance to support their own ideas. Their heads are always ducking down behind the parapet.
For as long as the government, and the top conglomerates, refuse to engage the public in a way that befits a modern democracy, the audience out there will not trust them.
Michael Breen is chairman of Insight Communications Consultants Exclusive Partner of FD International. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.