Public Broadcaster Shouldn't Be Equated With State Media

Kim In-kyu, new president of the Korea Broadcasting System, had to fight his way to the inaugural ceremony through the resisting unionists Tuesday.

President Lee Myung-bak's controversial appointment of his former campaign aide to the public broadcaster's top post once again shows how little he cares about public opinions in pursuing his goals.

This also means people will be forced to watch a repeat of the drawn-out labor-management strife at the state-invested cable news channel, YTN, last year, only in a greatly magnified and probably far more serious version.

The latest move is in line with the arrests of MBC-TV PDs and an Internet economic commentator critical of the government's policy as well as the railroading at the National Assembly of a bill to reshape the nation's media industry. The Constitutional Court has ruled the legislative process illegal, but fallen short of denying its efficacy.

Little wonder the nation fell 30 places, from 39th in 2007 to 69th this year, in the global press freedom index tallied by the Reporters Without Borders. President Lee, who takes great pride in the scheduled hosting of the G20 summit next year, might well ponder for a moment which of the two will make Korea a genuinely advanced country ― the 15th-largest GDP ranking or 69th-placed freedom of speech?

In his job interview, Kim reportedly reaffirmed his vow to drastically trim the organization, particularly what he regards as an overstaffed PD section, saying, ``KBS would have little problem even if up to 300 PDs are gone." Add to this the remark by Choi See-joong, chairman of the Korea Communications Commission and President Lee's broadcasting czar, who said, ``Television news should become more 'colorless,'" and viewers will have a public broadcaster with few critical news programs produced under the so-called PD journalism.

Admittedly, KBS has quite a few problems and is far from an ideal state in view of its poor managerial efficiency and excessive commercialism forgetting its original duty as a public broadcaster. Its employees and organized labor need to ask themselves in this regard whether their fight against the new chief hand-picked by Lee is strictly for protecting the political neutrality and freedom of speech instead of keeping their iron bowl.

We are nevertheless certain that any attempt to reform KBS through a political designate will do more harm than good to the broadcaster as well as the media industry as a whole. In short, the public would rather have an inefficient broadcaster than a politically biased one, as it should first be a media outlet before it is a profit-making enterprise.

That KBS abruptly broadcast live President Lee's address at a groundbreaking ceremony of the ``four-river refurbishing project" instead of a K-League soccer game as originally scheduled on Sunday was a grim reminder that the nation might be heading back to the 1970s and '80s when all evening news programs started with ``Presidential items."

Various opinion polls show Koreans, in a ratio of 2 to 1, think the nation's democracy and press freedom have suffered sharp setbacks over the past two years. If our concerns prove correct, the Lee administration could go down as having seriously undercut people's basic right. Only, the people will not be able to see it on KBS news in case media control efforts proceed undeterred as they are now.