By Oh Young-jin
Assistant Managing Editor
I was intrigued to find sizable headlines in Korean vernacular newspapers last week accusing some international media outlets of renewed Korea bashing. So I crosschecked the original articles in question to see what all the fuss was about.
While leafing through the newspapers and a magazine to find the pieces that had allegedly overstated the dire state of the Korean economy, I had a premonition that it must be much ado about not big a deal. My Shakespearean guess turned out to be not terribly wrong. It was another case of overreaction by the Korean media, but a close examination would show the causes involved were wide-ranging, including their jingoistic tendency, selective translation and wanton emphasis and buck-passing bureaucrats. These were the same causes that I believe triggered the Korean media vs. international media duel at the start of what turned out to be a global financial tsunami last year.
This is not an isolated case unique in Korean media but a universal characteristic with the media of most countries because of their peculiar position of looking at things from a third-party perspective (This may be the subject of another column).
First, here's my guess on how these Korea-bashing allegations made it into the newspapers.
A Korean wire service picks up the articles and put them out in Korean. In the process, provocative parts are given fuller play with qualifiers dropped. The bureaucrats at the Ministry of Strategy and Finance are alerted and report to their seniors. Those at the top of the chain of command get upset and order the subordinates to issue rebuttals.
An emotional briefing is given to the Korean press-club reporters. By then, the reporters and their editors are worked up, being entrapped in an us-or-them dualistic mentality. Voila! Comes that attention-grabbing, and globalization-defying accusatory headline. Then, throw in the jitters felt by the bureaucrats and journalists about a potential second economic crisis in 10 years and the mix would be made for a perfect storm.
Admittedly, this is an oversimplified account and I know, as one engaged in the trade of journalism, of pressures involved about last-minute judgment calls and a flurry of background checks in the newspaper business but, above all, journalistic sense of mission to get facts out.
At any rate, the result is still not good public relations for Korea.
If the finance ministry felt vindicated to read the ``counterpunches'' in the Korean vernacular newspapers, they couldn't be more wrong. As a matter of fact, it amounts to a dereliction of duty. The chance is that international press takes it with suspicion, wondering whether the Korean government is hiding something and feeling tempted to revisit the contentious points. It's not difficult to find such signs in between the lines of their follow-up articles. Plus, Korea was caught for lying about the level of foreign reserves in the lead-up to the 1997 currency crisis. It was one international wire service, not the Korean media that found it out first.
There may not be a royal road to dealing with international press, but understanding their unique characteristics will help.
More often than not, international correspondents are a step further removed from the source of news than the domestic media. This is why their reports are sometimes taken out of context from a Korean point of view. So it is important to keep them in context by granting them access to key policymakers or giving them in-depth briefings. Then, the finance minister or other ministers with portfolios related to international matters should maintain channels of communication with at least a couple of the correspondents who work with the important international media outlets. The purpose of these channels is to get their side of story to foreign journalists. This approach is mutually beneficial to both sides ― giving the ministers a clue about the priorities of international media and vice versa.
The bureaucrats need to be ``thick-skinned.'' In other words, they should resist the pressure for immediate reactions to what they think are biased articles, and set an order of reactions thought-out in advance rather than acting out on their impulses. There are other more civilized options available in dealing with biased media reports. For instance, the government may use its embassies and have them contact and directly explain how they are wrongly portrayed to the international media in question, request corrections accordingly, or send letters to the editors.
It may sound like self-promotion but English-language newspapers remain underutilized on this account. All three, including mine, are in a unique position to play an honest broker for both sides.
Last but not least, there should be a coordinator in a senior position who follows up on reports by foreign media and puts them into the context of an overall government response to ``bad press.'' If one follows up on international coverage about Korea for a month, it wouldn't be hard to see there is good coverage as well as bad and their reporting is not much different from domestic media. It all comes down to the level of familiarity.