A senior National Assembly member grumbled that he was receiving some 80 calls to his cellphone from reporters every day. Excluding hours in bed, this means that his phone is ringing every five minutes – most likely from any one of the 1,700 journalists covering the legislature and political parties.

Some 500 men and women reporters are currently accredited to the Blue House although their access to the president or the presidential staff is known to be very much restricted. They consist of writers and cameramen representing newspapers, broadcasting networks, online news outlets, magazines and other kinds of media.

Even officials of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, which is in charge of the media industry, have no concrete idea of how many people are engaged in gathering and publishing information, many with the help of electronic and mobile devices. Then there are millions who freely disseminate private and public information through the use of social networking.

Our media environment is getting increasingly gloomy. Fewer and fewer people read newspapers, as the annual reports of the Audit Bureau of Circulation reveal. Corporate advertisers reduce their spending due to the declining effect of print ads. So, writers, editors and media managers perceived a significant distance from reality on the part of the Constitutional Court when it refused last week to exclude journalists from jobs to be governed by the new anti-corruption law.

The Law on Prohibition of Illicit Solicitation and Exchange of Money and Other Valuables, otherwise known as the Kim Young-ran Act, to go into effect next month, is a necessary piece of legislation, but is much too late as far as journalists are concerned. A working journalist quipped that the statute was “For the ghosts of the good old days. Bribing journalists? Oh please. We may have to bribe them.”

Well, there are rotten apples, in two extreme strata: Some in the major institutions with huge influence and some others in the emerging outlets who had taken up no code of ethics before entering the battlefield of information. For the latter group, the press circles have devised the apt title of “pseudo-journalists.”

Yet, let us all be a little more self-inquisitive and look for the root of corruption in Korean journalism that came under the scrutiny of the new statute. During the Korean War and following the cease-fire, Army units conducted “welfare projects” for their respective areas of responsibility, mainly supplying wood to civilian lumber mills and distributing fuel, food and other supplies from U.S. military aid materials. In black-marketing those goods, officers shared their loot with the watching reporters. So it began.

Syngman Rhee’s 12 years and Park Chung-hee’s 18 years hardened a collaborative structure between the authoritarian powers and the media, while there persisted resistance by the pro-democracy force supported by liberal media elements. Press corps at government agencies, press liaison officers and intelligence apparatuses formed a mechanism of collusion between the media and political power, with money and gifts used as lubricant.

When this system of mutual sustenance unraveled through the democratization reforms of the late 1980s, some liberal media personnel initiated a self-cleansing campaign to reject gifts and favors from political and industrial sources. This drive spread widely among media organizations, and codes of ethics were established by press organizations and individual newspapers.

Three decades later, the legislation of the Kim Young-ran act, subjecting journalists under its jurisdiction, reveals how the media world failed to earn sufficient trust from the rest of society despite its contributions to its democratic development during the intervening period.

The media environment has changed a lot with new media outlets making massive inroads into Korean journalism, taking advantage of the nation’s advanced information technology. Traditional/mainstream journalists have struggled hard to keep their newspapers afloat and continue to lead the information market, adjusting to technical innovation as much as possible.

To their great regrets, however, public perception of their collective ethics remains below what they believe they deserve. Whenever there are rave previews and reviews of local or foreign movies, glorifying articles about a rising star in the political arena, and introductions of a highly efficient robotic system at a manufacturing firm, unjust favoritism is suspected.

Few who know the Korean journalism today would think of many cases in which the new anti-corruption law needs to be applied. We have passed that stage, and the competition-pressured newspapers today all have internal systems to prevent foul play.

Yet, the shade of shame from the past is still cast over our media community. Adherence to accuracy, justice and integrity is the best and only policy of the legitimate media to see a revision, sooner than later, of the Kim Young-ran act to knock off “journalists” from Article 2 of the statute. 

By Kim Myong-sik

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