S. Korea’s Push Toward Democracy May Bring the Press Its Long-Sought Freedom

Kim Tae Hong and Im Chai Kyung have managed to put out 12 issues of their underground magazine in the last two years by signing secret contracts with six different printing firms.

“There is always the fear that the police will raid the print shop,” Im said recently.

Indeed, on five occasions copies of the magazine--Mal (Words)--have been confiscated. The printer “usually gets jailed for about a week,” Kim said.

The press has not had an easy time of it in the seven years since President Chun Doo Hwan came to power in South Korea.

Reporters and producers at Munhwa Broadcasting Corp., 70% of which is owned by the government’s powerful Korean Broadcasting System, have also gone through trying times. In addition to being forced to glorify Chun and ignore his critics, staff members say, the TV network has been forced to tailor the news.

Press Freedom May Be Near

For one program, “Beautiful Han,” which was produced on orders to praise a pet Chun project, cleaning up the polluted Han River, cameramen were assigned to film fishermen pulling their catch out of the water. But there were no fish; the producer had to buy some at a nearby market.

On another occasion the network reported that an inspection team of opposition party members had been beaten by the operators and inmates of a so-called welfare center where the government forcibly houses vagrants. Then a network executive wrote the script for a follow-up program in which the opposition party members were blamed for provoking the attack, three staff members said.

Now, magazine publishers Kim and Im, the three network staff members and many other critics of the Chun government say they believe that freedom of the press soon will be achieved in South Korea.

“As a whole, we are leaning toward optimism,” Kim said, “although there will be a bumpy road ahead.”

‘Can’t Stop the Tide’

Kim has spent two of the Chun years in prison. He and Im were among those who lost their jobs in the established news media in 1980, when Chun purged more than 700 journalists.

Since June 29, when Roh Tae Woo, chairman of the ruling Democratic Justice Party, promised democratic reforms, “all society is heading toward democracy,” one of the network staffers said. “Broadcasting can’t be left out. They can’t stop the tide.”

The Rev. Kim Kwan Suk, who retired not long ago as president of the Christian Broadcasting System, a nationwide religious network, said: “The forthcoming government will allow everybody freedom of expression, whether in the press or in broadcasting. A new movement, a new social atmosphere, has set in. People are more self-confident, more mature, more assertive. That’s what makes me optimistic.”

Already, the Ministry of Information and Culture, one of four agencies that helped to curtail press freedom, has announced its intention to scrap the repressive Basic Press Law of 1980. Last week, the ruling party submitted to the National Assembly two bills to replace it--one for the print media and one for broadcasting.

Near-Revolution Likely

Only one major point of contention with the opposition remained. The ruling party wants to require anyone who wishes to start a newspaper to prove that he has the necessary facilities, such as printing presses, but the opposition Reunification Democratic Party wants the law to allow anyone to start a newspaper, even if it is mimeographed.

It is expected that the laws will be enacted when a regular session of the National Assembly convenes on Sept. 20.

A near-revolution of the nation’s broadcasting media, all of which are now under direct government control, appears likely.

In the new law, a Central Broadcasting Commission composed of four representatives from the executive, the judicial and the legislative branches of government would supervise radio and TV broadcasting. The Korean Broadcasting System would be transformed into a public corporation, controlled by a board of directors composed of representatives of different segments of society, who would, in effect, name the president of the TV network. Until now, the head of the network has been appointed by Chun.

Many Tied to Chun

The last five presidents of South Korea’s two nationwide radio and TV networks have all been former secretaries to Chun. Nearly half of the Munhwa network’s regional station directors are former army officers, and many studied with Chun at the Korea Military Academy.

The ministry has also announced plans to disband its Public Information Policy Office, which for the last seven years has issued “guidelines” to the media while at the same time denying publicly that it was censoring the media.

One former government official predicts that whoever is elected president to succeed Chun next Feb. 25 “will completely reorganize the ministry and make it the smallest ministry in the Cabinet.”

Newspapers have already announced plans to start sending reporters beyond their circulation areas, ending their government-enforced reliance on a single news agency for reports of news elsewhere in the country.

Changes Already Taking Place

Also, limits have been removed on the number of pages a newspaper might have in any one issue. And government orders on how events should be reported--or not be reported--have all but disappeared.

At Munhwa, for example, a regular government-ordered program on “The Person of the Month,” which featured people Chun had honored for their contributions to society, has disappeared.

At both networks, the 9 p.m. news, which had been known cynically as the 9:15 news because the first 15 minutes was always devoted to propaganda, has suddenly become a real news program.

Newspapers now only infrequently run the “Royal Box”--a feature on Chun or his wife that used to appear regularly in the upper left-hand corner of Page 1.

Exception to the Rules

The single exception to these looser rules, according to two newspaper executives, is reporting on Communist North Korea. When the Pyongyang government proposed July 23 to negotiate a mutual troop reduction to below the level of 100,000, the news media in South Korea were asked to treat the proposal as propaganda. All complied.

One of the newspaper executives said the day may come, though not soon, when a South Korean government will even permit citizens to listen to North Korea radio.

Government guidance has become so ingrained in the minds of many editors and reporters that the press has not gone as far as it might, some insiders say.

Park Kwon Sang, who was deposed in the 1980 purge as editor of the daily Dong-A, said: “Since June 29, press controls seem to have evaporated almost entirely, but controls had been so tight I don’t think (editors and reporters) have been able to exercise their new freedom.”

The Munhwa staffer members said much the same thing. One, who asked not to be identified by name, said: “In seven years, I never saw a desk man reject orders he received from the Blue House (the president’s office) or any of the other government agencies. Indeed, they often picked up the phone and asked for instructions on how to handle stories.”

No More Official Visits

Another staffer said that officials of the Blue House no longer come around to the network offices. Nor, he said, do officials of the Ministry of Information and Culture, the Agency for National Security Planning--formerly the Korean CIA, or the Defense Security Command, the military’s intelligence watchdog agency.

“But the editors still make calls to get instructions,” he said, and he complained that many TV reporters “lack the spirit” to report freely.

“These people,” one of his colleagues said, “have lived with the government guidelines so long that the guidelines have become part of them. They automatically give certain news a specific level of importance. Our struggle for freedom of reporting is as much internal as external.”

dai Not everyone in the press is pleased that the government has lifted its restrictions on the 700 purged journalists. Many of the 700 now want to be rehired, and this would mean displacing the people who replaced them.

The Council for a Democratic Press Movement, a group of purged journalists headed by the magazine publisher Kim, is demanding not only reinstatement but back pay. So far, only 30 of the 700 have been rehired.

The ruling party’s bill limits to 49% the shares that a single group or individual could own in any newspaper or publication. No family will be permitted to hold more than one-third of the positions on a board of directors of any newspaper.

According to a former government official, Korean journalism will probably pass through a period of instability and confusion while a new order takes shape. He recalled that more than 160 newspapers and 200 news agencies emerged after the overthrow of President Syngman Rhee in 1960. Many of them, he said, engaged in blackmail and yellow journalism, and for this reason the government now wants to control new outlets.

“But it is an undesirable byproduct that the public will have to tolerate as a result of their desire for a free press,” he added.