Moon Chang-keuk’s withdrawal of his nomination for prime minister presented President Park with the Sisyphean task of searching for another person to fill the second-highest office in the administration. And it added gloom to a nation shaken by a frontline soldier’s deadly shooting rampage and the disappointing performance of the national soccer squad in Brazil. Eleven passengers of the sunken ferry Sewol remain missing 70 days after the tragedy in the South Sea. Yoo Byeong-eun, the owner of the ship who is accused of criminal negligence and fraud, is still at large. 

While the Moon affair was raging on, many had hoped that the fate of the nominee would be decided through a confirmation hearing and vote in the National Assembly. In the end, the 65-year-old journalist chose to quit, leaving some to speculate on possible persuasion by the Blue House. It definitely was not the style of President Park Geun-hye, but politics is politics after all.

In journalism circles, Moon is known to be a rather moderate and conservative columnist, having served with the daily JoongAng Ilbo for three decades. Scrutinizers in the media who checked all his 280-odd weekly columns for the paper picked three or four pieces as samples of his “extremism,” but that seems insufficient to represent the writer’s true ideological tendency. If he is to be branded a champion of conservatism, every article every week should have raised controversies by hammering on the liberals in this sharply polarized intellectual world.

He seemed to be a man of common sense. The common sense that he certainly shares with many working journalists led him to call on the victims of wartime sex slavery to reject an apology or compensation from Japan without true atonement for the evil the imperialists did during the Pacific War. The JoongAng Ilbo home page carried a video of the hourlong lecture Moon gave at his Onnuri church in southern Seoul sometime in 2011 for an evening gathering of female worshippers. The newspaper thus allowed its readers to reach their own verdict on the charge that Moon is anti-Korean and pro-Japanese.

Out of sheer curiosity, I listened to his speech and read the full text. His main point was attributing the many tribulations in Korea’s modern history, including the Japanese occupation and the subsequent national division and internecine war, to “God’s will.” He sounded a little too straightforward and lacked insights into how God’s will in our history was revealed with regard to his judgment and salvation, but it is a question that not only theologians but most lay believers are forced to wrestle with throughout their lives. Moon apparently had little time to discuss it in depth before the church audience.

He also quoted books by Yun Chi-ho (1865-1945), an enlightenment advocate, and British explorer-writer Isabella Bird Bishop (1831-1904), who both noted the untidy way that Korean commoners lived. Moon described what he believed was the sad, hopeless social situation facing the Korean Peninsula under foreign encroachment. Moon even mentioned “the laziness DNA” developed in peasants under the worst exploitation by the nobility. Yet he talked about people’s great transformation to industriousness in the post-war years which made it possible for Korea to advance into the ranks of industrialized nations.

KBS proved its enormous investigative capabilities by unearthing two videotapes of Moon’s speeches ― one given at the main Onnuri chapel in 2011 and another at the church’s suburban location in 2011 ― the day after his nomination on June 10. Yet, in broadcasting the edited version of these tapes on its prime-time news, Korea’s top TV channel failed to clarify that Moon was quoting from the writings of Yun and Bishop. Moon was astonished and vowed to take the malicious distortion to court.

Just six years ago, President Lee Myung-bak was criticized by his opponents and the left-wing media for his decision to resume imports of U.S. beef prior to his official visit to Washington, despite the allegedly high risk of mad cow disease. MBC scared Korean consumers with misleading information on the incidence of the animal disease in the United States and the likelihood of human infection. The reports on mad cow disease proved false but the producers avoided punishment as the court recognized that their deeds were motivated by the “public interest.”

This time, KBS followed MBC’s footsteps, raising the torch of public interest, though to me it looked like a witch hunt. This time the state-run broadcaster ― the two labor unions of which had cooperated on weeks of strikes to oust their president on the grounds of interference in news programming ― picked up private material from a church function to attack someone who had never dreamed of being offered the job of the republic’s prime minister.

In order to scrutinize a journalist, it is necessary and sufficient to read his writings in the paper he works for or publications he writes for on a freelance basis. Similarly, we listen to the classroom lectures of a professor and read his academic treatises to appraise him and we listen to the sermons of a pastor to decide whether to attend his services regularly. The Onnuri church must have stored the video of Moon’s lecture for possible church use and never for a broadcaster’s public release, particularly with distorted editing.

Moon has returned to the quiet routine of teaching at university but many concerned people inside and outside the media world had wanted to see him go all the way to the Assembly confirmation hearing, taking on lawmakers of both camps head-on, to win or lose in the vote. Even if he had lost, he would have had nothing to be ashamed of, unlike those in the media and politics who rallied together to throw a bona fide personality into a furnace of prejudice without correctly understanding him or his thoughts.

The former prime ministerial nominee is a friend of a friend of mine and not one of my direct acquaintances. I only believed that he could best prove his qualifications for the position by not giving up in the middle of the bumpy process. 

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. He can be reached at kmyongsik@hanmail.net. ― Ed.