Paper Tigers

People moving into apartments in this city’s burgeoning suburbs can count on an unorthodox source of help: newspaper deliverymen so desperate to snare new subscribers that they will even help carry boxes to curry favor with potential customers.

Subscribers can also expect lavish gifts such as exercise machines and satellite dishes. Anyone who who declines is likely to find a newspaper--or five--waiting on the doorstep just the same.

Competition among South Korea’s 119 daily newspapers has become so fierce that a distributor for one major Seoul newspaper recently confessed to storming the offices of a rival who had lured away a prized subscriber, fatally stabbing one employee and wounding a second.

The killing intensified a newspaper war that has featured muckraking, allegations of dirty tricks and the unlikely spectacle of the nation’s second-largest newspaper, Joong-ang Daily News, suing the largest, Chosun Ilbo, for libel.

Behind the sensational headlines is a struggle for the soul of this nation’s newly freed press. Critics maintain that newspapers, only recently liberated from government repression, now find themselves owned by powerful conglomerates, or chaebol, that use their columns to promote corporate agendas.

“We supported the newspapers in fighting dictatorship,” said Lee Young Woo, chairman of Media Watch Coalition, a citizens’ group that has been agitating for press reform. “Now they have freedom. They have to serve the people now, not their own interests. They are not doing this.”

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There are signs that media moguls here, under pressure from parliament and the public, are taking steps to reform the economics and ethics of the newspaper business.

Samsung Group, the largest conglomerate in South Korea, has promised to spin off its paper, Joong-ang Daily News, by the end of this year to end charges that the chaebol influences news decisions.

Korean journalists also have adopted a strict new ethics code that calls for higher standards of independence and bans the practice of accepting money from news sources, including government agencies and corporations.

But jettisoning a legacy of more than 25 years of strongman rule will not be done overnight.

For decades, the government limited the number of papers permitted to publish in South Korea, kept careful control over their content and even regulated the number of pages each was allowed to print. Each region was permitted only one paper, and the Seoul-based dailies were required to get reports about what was going on elsewhere in the country from the state-controlled Yonhap news agency.

“Chosun Ilbo was allowed to put their own correspondents in Washington or Tokyo, but not in Pusan,” South Korea’s second-largest city, said Park Kwon Sang, former editor in chief of Dong-A Ilbo and now a syndicated columnist.

The generals could count on a tame press; newspaper publishers, in turn, were insured against competition.

When the repressive press law was abolished in 1987, chaebol--flush with capital from their skyrocketing exports--began starting up papers as fast as they could buy ink and import the newsprint that had been in short supply.

“Now each province has two or three or four newspapers, most of which are owned by little, local chaebol,” Park said.

From 30 dailies nationwide in 1987 the number zoomed to 65 in a year’s time. By 1995, there were 148 dailies. The total has fallen to 119 as of this month, a victim of newspaper overpopulation, the Korean Press Institute and the Ministry of Information report.

Readers are so inundated that some distributors are accused of giving away papers for months on end, bribing readers with gifts worth vastly more than the cost of a subscription and even refusing to allow people to cancel subscriptions.

Without an accepted system to audit the number of copies sold, some publishers print thousands of papers that go straight from press to dumpster just so they can claim high readership to justify higher advertising rates.

Park says that 5.5 million of the 12 million papers printed in Seoul daily are given away and that 3 million copies, equivalent to 1.2 million tons of newsprint, are dumped every day. “They say [the publishers] are losing 20 billion to 30 billion won [$25 million to $37 million] a year, but they’re willing to spend the money for propaganda purposes or to protect themselves against competitors or to gain access to power,” Park said.

Of Seoul’s leading dailies, three are owned by the conglomerates Samsung, Hyundai and Hanhwa. Two more are owned by giant newspaper companies, two by churches and another by the government.

Large and small, the chaebol are in fierce competition for everything from government contracts to hotel customers to the political influence gained through a large newspaper readership. “Naturally, they select news in favor of their own interests or against the interests of their competitors,” Park said.

For example, in April the Home Affairs Ministry announced that a government review of the safety of amusement parks and children’s theme parks found problems at 50 establishments, including Everland, a popular theme park owned by Samsung Group, according to Media Watch’s Lee. When Joong-ang Daily News, owned by Samsung, reported the story, it failed to mention the Everland problems yet played up defects at competing sites, he said.

Similarly, Hyundai’s Munhwa newspaper criticized the government licensing process after the auto giant failed to get approval to enter the personal computer service business, Lee said.

Joong-ang executive Lee Guy-Jin maintains that Samsung never interferes in editorial decisions. In fact, he said, because of the economic security provided by its prosperous owner, the paper is better able to withstand attempts by big advertisers to shade the news.

Joong-ang has spent millions of dollars revamping its content, making the paper more colorful and hiring professional reporters. As a result, its circulation has zoomed from 1.5 million copies to a reported 2.38 million copies a day. It now threatens to overtake Chosun Ilbo, which claims a daily circulation of 2.6 million.

The intense competition is squeezing both papers; Joong-ang’s Lee said his paper is making money, but just barely. The circulation war turned violent in July when a Joong-ang distributor killed a Chosun distributor in a fight over turf.

In retaliation for that slaying, and for what they saw as overly aggressive sales tactics bankrolled by deep-pocketed Samsung, Chosun Ilbo and several other papers began printing a barrage of negative stories about Samsung.

To appreciate the flavor of the resulting ruckus, imagine what would happen if Ford Motor Co. used a paper it owned to dig up and publish stories attacking rival General Motors Corp., which also had a newspaper.

One Chosun Ilbo article reported that two Samsung employees had stolen classified military procurement information, leading to their arrest. But the story did not mention that the culprits--two military retirees--were alleged to have swiped the secrets long before they were hired by Samsung.

Lee said another article falsely accused Joong-ang of hiring gangsters to buy up copies of rival papers and destroy them before readers could see them. Joong-ang is now suing Chosun Ilbo, accusing it of libel. Chosun Ilbo Managing Editor Lee Young Duk said Samsung had retaliated by cutting off all advertising by Samsung-owned companies in the rival newspaper.

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Press watchdogs hope the war will ultimately lead to better newspapers. Critics say the South Korean press, though much improved, remains reluctant to challenge authority and is too often staid, inaccurate or politically biased. Both Joong-ang and Chosun say they are trying to improve their content; Joong-ang has hired economists and doctors to cover finance and medicine, for example, and Chosun has created an ombudsman position to provide responses to reader criticism.

Both newspapers are promising to bury the hatchet. But Chosun’s Lee Young Duk said a lasting peace can only prevail “as long as big chaebol do not interfere with managing newspapers and newspapers do not protect the interests of the chaebol.”

Chi Jung Nam in The Times’ Seoul bureau contributed to this report.

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Newspaper Wars

The number of daily newspapers in South Korea has skyrocketed since a repressive press law was abolished in 1987:

1995: 148

1994: 126

1993: 112

1992: 112

1991: 98

1990: 85

1989: 70

1988: 65

1987: 30

1986: 30

1985: 30

1984: 30

1983: 29

1982: 29

Sources: Korean Press Institute; Ministry of Information