Reporters return to work after 9-year protest

Cho Seung-ho, left, and Hyun Duk-soo, center, in separate interviews with The Korea Times. / Korea Times Photo by You Soo-sun.
Roh Jong-myun, right. / Courtesy of YTN Labor Union

Their return signals hope for Korea's press freedom

By You Soo-sun

Nine years after being dismissed for protesting the political maneuvering of their company, three reporters from one of Korea's main broadcasters YTN will return to their posts, Monday. In this interview with The Korea Times, the three reporters ― Hyun Duk-soo, Roh Jong-myun, and Cho Seung-ho ― gave their accounts of what happened, what has changed and what they plan to do upon their return.

On Oct. 6, 2008, six reporters were discharged and 33 others punished at the news-only cable channel YTN. It was for their months-long rally aimed to unseat Koo Bon-hong who parachuted his way into the company's top management using his close ties to then-President Lee Myung-bak. What they wanted was simple: editorial independence from the government.

But when the three began their struggle, no one thought it would last this long. When it began none of them was older than 40; now they are all in their late 40s.

For Hyun Duk-soo, what led him to protest was a simple trigger. It was the people who yelled, "Turn off the lights at YTN," furious at the media's bias and its underreporting of the U.S. beef chaos that led tens of thousands to the streets against the Lee Myung-bak administration.

"This could result in complete destruction of the company, I thought. Its reputation, everything we have built up over the years," Hyun said.

And he was right. After their dismissal, YTN's viewership plummeted and is now the lowest among all cable networks.

About when he heard the news they would be getting their jobs back, he said, "It's just in the natural order of things. I never lost faith, and that's how I managed to get through these nine long years."

"It wasn't what I signed up for," said Roh Jong-myun, who was the union leader at the time. "It just built up, one year after another."

And with every passing year, he told himself: "I need to get through this." It was, he said, part of a struggle to restore justice to the Korean media.

Their recent return was announced Aug. 4, after the management and the labor union reached a deal that would get them their jobs back and also their original positions they had left nine years earlier.

It came less than three months after the new liberal Moon Jae-in administration took office. Restoring media freedom was one of his main pledges, and one of the first steps of the administration was restoring the jobs of journalists who were fired for political reasons.

"Of course I am grateful, but it was also a somewhat bitter moment," was Cho Seug-ho's answer to a question about the settlement that was reached only months into the Moon Jae-in administration. "I wonder why the management and the government had tried so hard to resist something so simple as this."

For Cho, the past nine years have given him a chance to view the media from the outside, allowing him to make unbiased judgments about his company's handling of the news. "None of us watched YTN. It hurt me to watch, to see what it had turned into," he said, "not that other channels were any better."

But they are all optimistic about what the future holds for the media. They see change coming. "Perhaps this is a small incident, but I feel our society is finally back on track," Cho said. "Now we're getting back to normal." Recently, he started watching YTN again and has already noticed improvements.

Positive turnaround, but more changes needed

The three journalists' dismissal was symbolic of the deterioration of press freedom in Korea during the previous conservative administrations of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye. In 2012, six journalists from another major broadcaster MBC were also let go and are still awaiting an upper court ruling. Hundreds of employees at Korea's two largest broadcasters have recently gone on or have announced a strike aimed at restoring editorial independence from company management appointed under the previous administration.

Accordingly, Freedom House lowered Korea's freedom of the press status from "free" to "partly free" in 2011 for the first time in nine years. Based on reports by international watchdog Reporters Without Borders, Korea's press freedom ranking continued to drop in subsequent years: 50th in 2013, 57th in 2014, and 70th by 2016 among 180 countries assessed.

Just as the rankings dropped, so had the people within major broadcasters, Hyun said. "It became extremely difficult for people to confront the government, let alone the management. Not only that, we started to see people within the company, including reporters, suck up to the government for their own self-interest." And thus did the people's confidence in major news outlets fade away.

During this years-long turmoil, the dismissed journalists agreed on one thing: to continue fighting, and to do so within the media industry. "Losing our identity as journalists would be a real defeat in this battle. I thought we needed to continue working in the media in whichever way we could," Roh said.

All of them have kept to their word. All of the dismissed journalists have at some point worked at Newstapa, a liberal independent media outlet notorious for revealing dirty secrets behind top officials and business leaders. Hyun has been at the outlet since 2015 and just finished his last week there. Roh and Cho most recently worked at Crowdpapa, which ranks and shares stories of various news outlets based on users' social media feedback.

They all emphasized the role that regular citizens play in shaping the news. Cho described these as platforms where "collective power comes to the fore." He believes it should also be the case in major outlets and hopes to take this lesson back to YTN.

Things began to shift when the new liberal Moon Jae-in administration took over, which has shown his will to fulfill his key pledge of restoring media freedom. But what has caused the real change was the power of the people who made their voices heard. This, the three journalists stressed, is just the beginning.