The Tatsuya Kato episode has fizzled out. The prosecution decided not to appeal the Seoul district court’s not-guilty ruling for the former Seoul bureau chief of the Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun, who was charged with defaming President Park Geun-hye.

Had our prosecutors been a little more prudent and independent in their thinking, all the noise over press freedom and responsibility that reverberated across the Korea Strait over the past 14 months could have been saved.

In Tokyo, the Sankei issued extras in Japanese and English and all other major Japanese dailies splashed the news of Kato’s acquittal last week as the top story.

Seoul’s Foreign Ministry, which had officially asked the court to exercise leniency, must now be releasing a sigh of relief. For all other actors as well as onlookers, it was a storm in a teacup.

The court opined that Kato’s article published in the Sankei’s online edition in August 2014 was factually deficient, but needed to be protected in the name of freedom of the press. After Kato was indicted in October, he was banned from leaving the country for six months, which invited appeals and protests in Japan and elsewhere from press freedom advocates.

While I am reluctant to regard Kato as a crusader for freedom of expression, I feel sorry that our prosecutors had demanded the harsh 18 months in jail for Kato.

Kato may now work on a book about Korea. He has the distinction of being the first Japanese journalist to be criminally indicted here in connection with a story in the five decades since Korea and Japan normalized relations. I again read the Korean translation of Kato’s column and regrettably I reconfirmed that he had little to be proud of as far as this particular piece was concerned.

“President Park missing on the day of the Sewol sinking: Who was she meeting?” was the title of the column. It dealt with rumors on the president’s fictitious tryst with one of her former aides on the day of the maritime disaster. The journalistic value of the article would have been a little higher if it was the result of the writer’s own research and investigation instead of being based almost entirely on a commentary by a Korean journalist who quoted stock market circulars.

We understand it is more difficult for foreign correspondents, be they from Japan, China, the United States or Europe, to develop dependable sources during their limited time of assignment here. They have to rely chiefly on publicly available information, including local media reports. So their head offices expect them to concentrate on analytical pieces rather than trying to make big scoops.

My involvement with the foreign press goes back to the 1970s when I served as the Seoul correspondent for Reuters. It was during the authoritarian rule of President Park Chung-hee, who issued a series of emergency decrees to control the local press, in addition to directly using physical and financial means to pressure it. Foreign media employees, whether Korean national or expatriate, were somewhat freer, but their activities had as many hurdles as their local counterparts.

Some called it “missionary spirit” as those foreign correspondents harbored a degree of sympathy with Korean pro-democracy activists, but they invariably exhibited fine journalism. Names I still remember include Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post, Richard Halloran of the New York Times, Gebhard Hielscher of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Tom Pepper of the Baltimore Sun, and Peter Hazelhurst of the London Times, who mostly were based in Tokyo.

Two and a half decades later, I had an opportunity to get in touch with some foreign correspondents, this time as a government official to help keep them better informed of what was taking place in this country, primarily the good things. The nation had passed some 10 years from the “transition to democracy” but there still were bad things in the area of government-media relations.

The new liberal government of President Kim Dae-jung was in tension with the three major conservative newspapers, namely Chosun, Joongang and Dong-a, and the powers that be lost sleep finding ways to cope with their daily “attacks.” As these papers were critical of the administration’s Sunshine Policy of engaging with North Korea by offering generous material aid, they sought international media support.

Japanese correspondents whom I met during the years from the late 1990s to the early 2000s were mostly young and energetic on their first overseas assignment. They usually took two years of Korean language training either in Tokyo or in Seoul and were capable of reading Korean newspapers and understanding TV broadcasts by the time they started working here, an advantage over their counterparts from Western countries.

Kato must have wanted to produce a sensational piece that could be differentiated from others’ dispatches by touching on a sensitive issue. He picked up the Chosun Ilbo column by senior reporter Choe Bo-sik, who mentioned President Park’s relationship with Chung Yun-hoe, her personal assistant for seven years before her presidential bid. In his column, Kato called it a “romantic affair” and linked it to the president’s alleged absence from her place of duty for seven hours of April 16, 2014.

Kato’s column was published more than two weeks after Choe’s piece was printed. In his trial, Kato’s defense claimed it unfair that he alone was indicted while the other article said virtually the same thing about President Park. The acquittal could also mean that the Korean bench acquiesced to the defense logic. Still, the authorities did not necessarily have to deal equally with the two, because Sankei and Chosun are two different papers.

Overall, the court based its decision on the freedom of the press. We in the media profession should welcome anything that respects the freedom of expression, but we sometimes witness affairs where the claim to freedom of the press rather puts its sanctity at risk.

This refers to Kato’s case. He used the Chosun Ilbo column to make his narrative about the Korean president, even knowing that it was based on the stock market rubbish. Don Oberdorfer died last summer at the age of 84. If he were alive, I would have asked him how he thought of Kato’s column as a fellow foreign correspondent.

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. — Ed.