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Edited by Elaine Ramirez (elaine@groovekorea.com) COVER stORy www.groovekorea.com / November 2014 34 Real-life consequences of stifled speech Search for SolutionS Such a repressive climate can have tragic real- world consequences, notes Korea University’s Park. Three months before Sewol sank, a former employee of Chonghaejin, the ferry’s operator, reported the overloading of the ship to the ombudsman under the presidential office but was ignored. Because even truthful statements can be considered defamatory, Park says, whistle-blowers are strongly dissuaded from coming forward. “If the environment was favorable for whistle- blowing or raising issues or reporting facts, I think he (the ferry employee) would have just put it on the Internet instead of going to ombudsman services to talk about the persistent overloading problem.” The bungled response to the sinking may also have been exacerbated by tepid reporting in a climate hostile to free speech, Park says. He notes that on the day of the sinking, one survivor told both KBS and MBC in interviews that the Coast Guard had done little to rescue the passengers of the ferry. Neither station, however, aired his remarks. “What’s really unfortunate was that he gave the interview on the day of the sinking, at 4 p.m. And the broadcast media could have just reported it right there, because they were covering it 24 hours a day already, and had that gone out at that time ... the subsequent rescue efforts from that point on could have been wildly different, pushed by public opinion.” So is there any hope for Korea’s media to reform? Park p uts priority on scrapping criminal defamation and the current licensing regime for broadcasters. For Choi, the culture of exclusive press clubs is the “fundamental” problem. Above all, pundits agree on one common remedy: the public. There is wide agreement that citizens, as media consumers, bear heavy responsibility for the quality of their media. Part of the problem, critics say, is they are not living up to this responsibility. “I think journalists should keep their eyes on the government and big companies and other things, but at the same time, readers should keep an eye on the Korean media,” says Heo. She says Korean journalists on the whole have failed to demonstrate the importance of their profession. As a result, the public doesn’t fully appreciate the importance of high-quality media. “If a good article has a good influence on Korean society, maybe Korean readers can realize good articles are important. And good articles should be published, but (readers) have no experience. They don’t realize why good articles are important.” Ewha professor Lee similarly describes the public’s understanding and expectations of journalism as extremely low. Greater discussion about why journalism matters is crucial to developing better media, he says. “We need to study more, we need to talk more about freedom of the press, quality of journalism and so on, so that we have a higher level of expectations that can translate into some kind of public pressure on the media institutions to perform better.” ‘We need to study more, we need to talk more about freedom of the press, quality of journalism and so on, so that we have a higher level of expectations that can translate into some kind of public pressure on the media institutions to perform better.’ Lee Jae-gyeong, journalism professor at Ewha Womans University