The twin obsessions of the foreign press corps in Seoul are a) North Korea and b) K-Pop, K-Film, K-Anything-But-Politics. So rare is it for a big Western news outlet to say anything substantial about either the South Korean government or the opposition that when one does, it makes headlines here. Each side crows loudly on seeing itself praised overseas, and even more loudly when the other side comes in for criticism. Translation of the relevant quotes is done freely to say the least; Pound’s renditions of Chinese poetry were pedantic in comparison. A common trick is to claim that Famous American Newspaper X criticized South Korean politician Y, when in fact the former was merely reporting on South Koreans’ criticism of the fellow.
But such propaganda goes down well. The collective fury at Park Geun-hye in late 2016 – which many South Koreans now recall with embarrassment, the way Britons recall the hysteria after Lady Di’s death – was fed into by constant updates on how scandalized the world allegedly was. Most people groaning over their morning Hankyoreh or Chosun at the disgrace Park had brought to their country failed to realize they were really just reading local coverage of foreign coverage of local coverage.
Now that Moon’s administration is mired in scandals uncannily like the ones Park got impeached for, Western journalists show less interest than ever in covering South Korean politics. I can think of various reasons for this.
1) Since Trump was elected, most Western correspondents feel a moral duty to root openly for whatever main political figure in the host country they consider less Trump-like, who in this case is Moon. The same “mirror imaging” dictates that they root against South Korea’s main opposition party, to which they occasionally apply the label “far right,” although it’s well to the left of our Republicans, and most of its members voted in favor of impeaching Park in 2016.
2) When deciding which local stories merit attention, correspondents (and perhaps their editors) seem to follow the lead of the New York Times’ bilingual correspondent Choe Sang-hun, whose own record of stories over the past 10 or so years parallels the agenda of the once-opposition, now staunchly government-loyal Hankyoreh newspaper he used to write for. The language barrier also forces correspondents to rely on local assistants and interns who, like most young people here, get their news from the Naver portal, which has ties to the Blue House and steers clear of stories riling up the Moon-critical half of the country.
3) Foreign journalists are as reluctant as their local colleagues to annoy Moon’s excitable netizen base, especially since the orchestrated attacks in 2019 on a South Korean journalist for Bloomberg who had referred to his reputation in some quarters as a “spokesman for Pyongyang.” (The chairman of the ruling party denounced her as “a black-haired foreigner” for her “borderline traitorous” article.)
Perhaps you think I’m reading too much into media practices that have more to do with the fact that most Western people are just not interested in Asian party politics. Let me instance, then, the general failure to report on the local reaction to the lunch party Moon threw on February 20 for Bong Jun-ho, the director of Parasite. The president had allegedly just been briefed on the first steep jump in the number of daily coronavirus cases.
Now there you had a half-celebrity, half-political story that was both topically important and likely to interest a large number of Westerners, the movie buffs if no one else. It had the added advantage of coming with a photograph of the lunchtime merriment that became an instant meme in South Korea. But how much coverage of the ill-timed event or the backlash was there in the foreign press?
As the virus spread rapidly, keeping South Korea in second place for the total number of infections for several days on end, public anger grew over such things as:
- President Moon’s premature assurance that efforts to contain the virus had “entered a stable stage” for which reason the crisis would “end before long” (February 13)
- the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s public-service video, created to counter alarmism about the virus, that suggested: “How about watching a movie in the theater, or taking in a public performance, or having a meal in a restaurant?” (February 20)
- the ruling party spokesman’s sensational statement that “maximum sealing-off measures” would be imposed on the city of Daegu, forcing Moon to deliver a hasty (and not entirely convincing) clarification that no Wuhan-type sequestering had been meant (February 25)
- the “mask chaos,” i.e. the government’s flip-flopping statements on when and where citizens can buy masks, its inability to ensure a steady supply, and the resulting need for entire families to queue outside for long periods of time, raising the perceived risk of infection and placing special burdens on the elderly (esp. February 27 — March 8)
- the health minister’s various gaffes, ranging from his curiously heated assertion that the virus had been brought into the country by Koreans, not Chinese (February 27), to his claim, which infuriated the medical community, that doctors were only complaining about the shortage of masks because they wanted to stockpile them (March 12)
- and most of all, the government’s refusal to heed repeated calls by the Korean Medical Association for restrictions on the entry of Chinese, let alone the public petition on the Blue House website (initiated in January) for an entry ban on all Chinese travelers.
As an American I wish my own country’s health-care problems were of this relatively minor sort. For that matter I don’t believe things would have been handled any better by a conservative administration. But my point is that reasonably or not, half the South Korean public is angry about what it sees as incompetence, not least because Moon was elected in part on extravagant promises to out-mother Park on the health and safety front. Many a news outlet and Youtuber has congratulated him sarcastically on fulfilling his famous pledge to create “a Korea that has never been experienced before.” The snaking queues for masks are regarded by many Koreans, including left-wing friends of mine, as a national disgrace. A video by a tearfully angry Daegu woman has racked up over two million views. And in none of this has the Western press shown much interest.
The government’s response to public criticism has been to scapegoat the Shincheonji religious sect, a gathering of whose members inadvertently played a key role in spreading the virus around Daegu. These big sects have close ties to both sides of the aisle and are usually spared media scrutiny as a result — a few travel guides for Westerners say the whole topic should be avoided — but this time was different. (I don’t need to tell you which American newspaper led the way for the foreign press with an article on the “shadowy church.”) There have also been ruling-party attempts to link Shincheonji especially closely to the conservative opposition, despite the group’s ardent campaigning for an inter-Korean peace treaty. In a move widely criticized as empty grandstanding, the Moon-loyal mayor of Seoul sued the leader of the sect for “murder, injury and violation of prevention and management of infectious diseases.” Nor did prominent Moon supporters like the novelist Gong Ji-young scruple to imply in public that Daegu had been especially hard hit because it votes conservative.
Now that South Korea shows signs of turning the corner on the coronavirus, the foreign press is again hitting the panegyric notes it struck so prematurely in early February. John Power’s article in the South China Morning Post is a very long string of compliments and favorable soundbites, with a token “not without its missteps” bit at the end. (No critic of the government is actually quoted.) Praise is meted out more to the “authorities” than to the heroic medical workers in Daegu or its civic-minded citizenry.
It’s a good thing academia exists to provide the necessary nuance, depth and — no, scratch that. An article on “why Trump can’t copy South Korea’s coronavirus strategy” was in The National Interest on March 14 courtesy of Pusan National University’s Robert Kelly:
Finally, and this must be said, the leadership gap between the two countries is yawning…. Moon has shown a far greater willingness to take corona seriously and allow experts to run the response. There has been nothing here like Trump’s dithering over the last month, or his bizarre public announcements that this will just go away soon or is under control.
Where to begin? And why bother? I do wonder, though, how the Western press and its readers will make sense of the South Korean elections on April 15, should they result in anything less than a resounding victory for the ruling party. In closing I can only remind everyone overseas who has a serious interest or stake in Korea, and wants to anticipate developments here to some degree, that our media do no more justice to this complex half of the peninsula than to the other.
