Mosquitoes are back.

They are quite possibly the worst insects imaginable. The tiny yet ever-so-loud whirring noise their wings make is enough to drive a man insane, and the itch caused by their bite may as well have been cooked up by a medieval torturer.

These days their evil schemes are aided by manmade environments.

The water tanks and dank corners of older buildings are said to provide indoor habitat, allowing the tiny vampires to return earlier than they would in the wild.

In addition to the infernal whirring and the itch, they are vehicles for much greater evil.

In many countries, including Korea, mosquitoes spread potentially deadly diseases such as malaria and Japanese encephalitis.

Why not eradicate mosquitoes altogether?

Even if such a task were possible, there is more to the issue than simply getting rid of the problem.

While mosquitoes appear to be little more than pests to humans, they have a role in the ecosystem. One of the simpler examples is that mosquitoes are a food source. Mosquito larvae are food for aquatic animals, while mosquitoes are food for predators on land, and those predators are food for others higher up the food chain.

Eradication would also involve countless bodies of fresh water being drained and massive volumes of pesticide, the effects of which may be more damaging than mosquitoes and the disease they spread.

In other words, they have a place in the overall scheme of things.

Local news organizations face a similar problem.

For many in the local media, Internet portal sites have come to pose an increasingly annoying problem. A problem, just like mosquitoes, that poses a dilemma.

The difference is that while mosquitoes are depend on their victims to survive, news organizations depend heavily on portal sites to raise traffic. Another difference is that while humans can contemplate eradication of mosquitoes, the media is in no position to consider such a measure. And unlike mosquitoes, which are absent for about half of the year, Internet portals are here all the time.

Internet portal sites are now the biggest source of Web traffic for news organizations. Their influence has grown to the point that they are now effectively regulating the news within the “boundaries” of the Internet.

They now operate a “review and assessment” committee that has the power to give penalty points to news organizations whose stories are carried by their news services, and remove those with too many points.

The committee’s nominal purpose is to keep their news services “clean” and to remove those considered unfit to be in partnership with them, which is their prerogative entirely.

However, from the media’s perspective, it is a different story.

With this new committee deciding which story is okay, and which is not, it feels closer to regulation of what can and cannot be written about. If their committee finds a story offensive according to their standards, it will be penalized.

A news outlet deciding to address a complaint from a reader is one thing, but a committee affiliated to portal sites, which have vested interest in the matter at hand, effectively deciding for news outlets is another matter altogether.

Just as a mosquito sucks blood for its own interests, the feeling that Internet portals are monitoring online materials for their own interests and only for their self-interest cannot be shaken off.

However, it is not a case of big bad wolf portal sites being mean.

In many ways, the media have provided the cause for all this.

As with the mosquito problem, the media-portal issue is also aided by elements created by those on the receiving end.

In the race to take a bigger share of the online traffic, local media pour out sensationalist stories and photographs. They -- we — abuse Internet portal sites’ list of most searched terms and churn out stories containing the right keywords.

Many of the larger media organizations have spawned subsidiaries and affiliate specialist news outlets in an attempt to expand their online presences. Many of those operating more than one publication have got into the practice of sharing stories between publications, and posting advertisements disguised as news articles.

In the name of profit, local media have also allowed flash advertisements that many would call pornographic, some of which use snippets from actual pornographic films, to be displayed on their websites. To many, such practices would be more than enough to warrant action on part of the portal sites.

Like the human-mosquito relationship, news media-Internet portal relationship is complex and the eradication of either side is unthinkable and would bring immeasurable harm in the overall scheme of things.

Perhaps the only answer is for both sides to ease up a little, be more socially responsible and less self-serving.

And to somehow facilitate the natural selection of mosquitoes that are silent, disease free and have itch-free bites.

By Choi He-suk 

Choi He-suk is the digital content desk editor of The Korea Herald. He can be reached at cheesuk@heraldcorp.com. — Ed.