Documentary revealing media censorship during 2 previous governments due on Friday

By Kim Se-jeong

A documentary revealing the censorship of public broadcasting companies by former Presidents Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye is finally to be screened, Friday, after public broadcaster MBC tried to block it.

On Monday, a court in Seoul ruled against a request by five former and incumbent high-profile MBC executives, including former CEO Kim Jae-chul, that “Accomplices” should be banned. The five said the way the work portrayed them was derogatory and sued the production team, News Tapa, for defamation.

But the judge stated in his ruling: “What the documentary did was raise questions and criticisms about the plaintiffs. It’s different from defamation. Also, the plaintiffs had the chance to make their case against the work, but they chose not to do so and only sued the production company.”

In the documentary, MBC’s former CEO Kim was criticized for failing to live up to the expectations of the people as head of a public TV outlet, instead serving the interest of the two former presidents as a tool to manipulate public opinion. The documentary has a scene where the former MBC CEO refuses to give an interview to the documentary production team, which Kim complained portrayed him as a fugitive.

The judge also said, “The plaintiffs, as leaders of the public broadcasting company, are not private persons. Their actions and whereabouts are the subject of public interest and there is nothing wrong with the way the documentary team filmed them.”

Media censorship was common under the two previous conservative presidents. A case in point was KBS which was pressured by Cheong Wa Dae after the ferry Sewol disaster on April 16, 2014, to give less priority to the coverage of the incident which took more than 300 lives.

News Tapa is led by fired former MBC producer Choi Seung-ho. He’s also known for his previous work, “Confession,” another documentary telling the accounts of North Koreans and South Koreans falsely prosecuted for being North Korean spies or North Korean supporters in plots by the National Intelligence Service.

Almost 200 theaters across the country will screen the documentary.