Ruling on bribery file

Illegal campaign funding critically hurts public interests

When the public’s right to know clashes with the need to protect individuals’ privacy, which should be given precedence?

Quick-tempered people will not hesitate to choose the former citing democratic principles, but more cautious ones would say it would depend on the content of the information in question. If that information proves related with illegal donations to politicians and prosecutors, the answer should be clear even to a most prudent person.

The Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday on the ``NIS’s X-file” case ― which dealt with some media reports of Samsung Group’s bribery scheme obtained by National Intelligence Service through bugging ― regretfully defied this common sense apparent to even lay persons.

Chief Justice Lee Yong-hoon, in upholding a lower court ruling that found two reporters involved guilty, effectively took issue with the journalists’ use of illegally collected information, saying that ``wiretapped material should be used only for a report that points out the problems of illegal bugging.” More astonishingly, the eight majority justices ruled the reporting of ``what happened eight years ago can hardly constitute public interest.”

We agree means cannot always justify ends, and process is as important as outcome in a democracy. But they should take issue more with the illegal domestic spying by the state intelligence agency than the reporters’ use of its outcome. Moreover, it was the MBC report that brought the NIS’s unlawful practice of eavesdropping telephone conversations of private citizens into the light.

Far harder to understand was the highest court’s rationale that attempts in 1997 to exert influence on the nation’s presidential election and law enforcement system with money cannot be of public interest in 2005.

How many Koreans will think the notorious business-politics collusion ended six years ago when the report first hit the airwaves ― or even now? It was only last year that the time-honored connection between public prosecutors and their ``sponsors” brought about a loud public outcry for the cleaning up of the nation’s judicial branch.

We agree with the five dissenting justices in the 13-member bench, who said, ``The report was timely enough, as the nation had yet to introduce devices that could root out collusive links between politicians and businesspeople, as well as in view of the influence the business group has on our society.” Their conclusion sums up this case best: ``The benefits from reporting this issue are greater than those from keeping the privacy of communications.”

Leaving an even more bitter taste is a comparison with the so-called Pentagon Papers case, in which the New York Times and other U.S. media outlets began to report from 1971 how the Johnson administration had systematically lied to the public and Congress about its political and military intervention in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967.

Both cases dealt with past events, not ongoing ones. And at stake in America back then was the national interest, while it was a business group’s interest here. Which deserves protection more ― if at all? Seen from a different angle, the U.S. case concerned a foreign country, but the Korean case was related with picking its own president. Which is graver in nature?

By all accounts, the U.S. judicial branch made a far more difficult ― and justified ― decision for the sake of democracy and numerous elements that constitute it, not for a handful of political, industrial and legal bigwigs.

The latest ruling also shows why the civic groups call for injecting ``new blood” into the top court, which has been dominated by conservative male judges under the Lee Myung-bak administration.

Then the entire bench might as well discuss the concept of public interest, and why it should be different between Korea and the U.S.