S. Korean Network Airs Rehearsal Results : TV Blooper Fuels Vote-Rigging Suspicions

A local television station sparked a barrage of protests and fueled suspicions of vote-rigging in Tuesday’s National Assembly election by broadcasting the results of one district race--14 hours before the polls opened.

The station apologized Tuesday for what it called “a technical error” in announcing, at 5:03 p.m. Monday, that a candidate from the ruling Democratic Justice Party had won a seat in Cheju, about 300 miles south of Seoul, with 39.2% of the vote.

Before ultimately scoring a surprise election victory that denied the ruling party a majority in the assembly, opposition leaders charged that the 90-second broadcast was evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate election results.

Early returns showed that the ruling party’s candidate in Cheju, Hyun Kyung Dae, actually lost the seat to an independent candidate.

The opposition has alleged that the government rigged the presidential election last December by using a sophisticated computer program to simulate plausible voting patterns in President Roh Tae Woo’s victory, by a plurality, over rivals Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung.

Protesters staged street demonstrations overnight Monday in Cheju and irate viewers swamped the station with telephone complaints, nearly paralyzing regular programming. The demonstrations spread Tuesday to university campuses in Seoul.

The network, Munhwa Broadcasting Co., fired its Cheju station manager and four other officials Tuesday. Police were reportedly questioning technicians from the local station and from a relay station in Cheju operated by the Korea Telecommunications Authority.

The controversy came against a backdrop of charges of electoral fraud similar to those in the December contest. Charges of bribery and ballot tampering were widespread, with opposition sources reporting as many as 177 cases of campaign violence, and 87 cases of violence at polling places on election day.

The MBC network, which is owned and controlled by government interests, said it was conducting a rehearsal of its election coverage when the audio part of a test broadcast was inadvertently aired Monday.

“It was purely a technical error,” Cho Song Won, news director of Cheju MBC, was quoted in press reports as saying. “We should have blocked out the audio transmission. The engineers forgot to turn it off before beginning the rehearsal.”

The network’s dissident reporters’ union, which was formed to fight for freedom from government censorship, believes an attempt to manipulate election results was unlikely.

But union chairman Chung Ki Pyung said questions remain as to why the candidate from the ruling party was selected as the victor in the station’s scenario, and whether the rehearsal might have been intentionally aired in an attempt to influence the outcome of the balloting in Cheju.

He said both MBC and Korean Broadcasting Service, the government network that owns 70% of MBC, have caused “suspicions among the people” by failing to publicly address the allegations of their complicity in vote rigging in the presidential election.

“Unless there’s a fundamental change in the structure of the network and the way it operates, people will continue to have doubts,” Chung said in an interview with The Times.

A new press law provides that KBS must divest itself of ownership of MBC, but authorities refuse to say when this will be done. MBC was one of two private, independent television networks in South Korea when the government seized it in 1980.