Media Coverage on Ship Sinking Has Been Pathetic

In a tragic accident at sea, the South Korean ferry Sewol went down in waters  of West Sea. The ferry, carrying mainly school students, was heading to the southern resort island of Jeju from the port of Incheon in the north-west.

The Korean media coverage of the Jindo ferry disaster overall has been sloppy, unintelligent and somehow naive and unethical at the same time.

YTN, the first broadcaster to provide live coverage from the scene Wednesday morning, took up and ran with a school official’s comment and reported that all of the passengers were alive and safe.

The news host practically celebrated during a giddy interview with one of the rescues high-school students. the anchor was looking subdued hours later when the government revised the number of people unaccounted for to over 290.

YTN’s blunder highlighted a slew of mistakes news organizations made during the early hours of their coverage of the ship sinking, Wednesday. It could be argued that much of initial confusion was inevitable ― the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters appeared to be in a state of panic itself.

But the quality of news reporting has actually gotten worse since then.

As rescue workers risked their own safety fighting bad weather, murky waters and strong currents to approach the ship that evening, MBC used chart graphs to explain how much families would get in insurance money should their loved ones be found dead. SBS coaxed an interview out of a rescued six-years-old girl struggling to cope with the likely possibility that the rest of her family were dead. A JTBC news host had to ask one of the surviving high-school students whether she knew that many of her schoolmates were dead, to which she replied “no” before sobbing uncontrollably. MBN showed it will do anything to boost audience numbers, even if it means embracing conspiracy theories.

Newspapers and online news outlets were not much better.

Chosun Ilbo, Kookmin Ilbo and Money Today used Internet headlines to explain that the students on the ship were insured by Dongbu Fire&Marine Insurance and the teachers by Mertiz, which may or may not have been intended as a service for the companies that double as their advertisers.

Of course, not everyone deserves to be blamed. There still are journalist on Jindo continuing tough on-the-ground reporting with a dedication to accuracy and fairness. It will be one of their stories that will explain what happened most fully and how it will affect the lives of people involved. Unfortunately, the works of these professionals are often burried under an avalanche of trashy content that reduce news organizations into slaves for clicks.

 Wants to know more about the accident? –Click!–>http://www.bbc
.com/news/world-asia-27045512

 

 

North Korean Propaganda Video Imagines a Brighter World, Without Manhattan

A new propaganda video was posted by North Korea. The video brought the problem that some scenes on the clip were lifted straight from the video game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.”

The video begins with an image of a main and he recounts a dream in words that appear on the screen. “I had a dream last night, a dream of soaring into space on board our Unda-9 rocket.”

Unha is the name of North Korean rocket series. The latest one was the Unha-3. So we can see that the man is imaging a future. After first showing footage of real rocket launch, the video shifts to animation.

He goes on saying what he sees from the rocket. “I see stars and the green Earth. I also see a unified Korea.” The video shows a unified, not divided, Korean Peninsula.

Then the video shows an overhead image of New York with the American flag. “Meanwhile, I see black smoke rising somewhere in America,” the man says. “It appears that the headquarters of evil, which has had a habit of using force and unilateralism and committing wars of aggression, is going up in flames it itself has ignited.”

At this point in the video, the computer-animated scene copied from “Call of Duty” show Lower Manhattan in flames.

The dreaming man finishes his line saying “No matter how hard the imperialists try to isolate and stifle us, they will not stop our people’s path toward our final victory of achieving a unified, strong and prosperous Korea.”

As this video show, in fact the North Korean media portray the foreign countries as corrupted and villains. The problem is that since North Korea actually controls all media system and even control the access of media, this is what the North Korean get to know about other countries outside.

video link: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=203_1360053143

 

 

Kim Jong-il tweet: South Korean Park Jeonggeun held

Park Jeonggeun, a political activist, re-tweeted the message “Long live Kim Jong-il” from the communist country’s official Twitter account. He said he intended to ridicule the leader, who died in December, but could face up to seven years in jail.
Amnesty accused South Korea of “failing to understand sarcasm”.
“Imprisoning anyone for peaceful expression of their opinions violates international law, but in this case the charges against Park Jeonggeun are simply ludicrous and should be dropped immediately,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty’s Asia-Pacific director.
Mr Park is a member of the South Korean Socialist Party, which openly and frequently criticises the North Korean regime
He stands accused of breaking the controversial National Security Law (NSL) which bans “acts that benefit the enemy”.
Amnesty and other human rights advocates argue that the NSL is being used to limit free speech in South Korea.
“The NSL has a chilling effect on freedom of expression,” Mr Zarifi continued. “It is not used to address threats to national security, but instead to intimidate people and limit their rights to free speech.”
The South Korean government has denied the law is being abused. Censorship issues surrounding Twitter have escalated after the micro-blogging service announced it would begin blocking tweets in some countries.
As this article shows, censorship regarding North Korea issues are sometimes is all a bit much. Some says all these things should be done in order to protect the national security and the public. However some people say it still carrying the regulations too far under the justification for protecting the country.

 

 

N. Korea Sentences 2 U.S. Journalists to 12 Years of Hard Labor

North Korea sentenced two American journalists to 12 years of hard labor in a case widely seen as a test of how far the isolated Communist state was willing to take its confrontational stance toward the United States.

The Central Court, the highest court of North Korea, held the trial of the two Americans,  Laura Ling and Euna Lee, and convicted them of “committing hostilities against the Korean nation and illegal entry.”

Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee have been held since they were detained by North Korean soldiers patrolling the border between China and North Korea on March 17.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has called the charges “baseless.”
The United States government had demanded that the North forgo the legal proceedings and release the two women.

The sentencing came amid rising tensions between Washington and Pyongyang. Earlier Monday, North Korea threatened to retaliate with “extreme” measures if theUnited Nations punished it for its nuclear test last month, and Washington warned that it might try to put the North back on its list of states that sponsor terrorism, a designation that could subject the impoverished state to more financial sanctions.

Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee were on a reporting assignment from Current TV, a San Francisco-based media company, when they were detained by the soldiers. The reporters were working on a report about North Korean refugees — women and children — who had fled their homeland in hopes of finding food in China.

They got released and went back to their families in the end eventually after former President Bill Clinton visited Pyongyang to negotiate their release. But still the problem remains. Is it really fine North Korean government to detain foreign journalists in the name of its laws or is there any way that we can restrain these unreasonable acts of North Korea? 

 

 

North & South Korea Media System Profile

North Korea’s media system is rooted in Communist media model. A dictatorial regime strongly controls the whole media system. All domestic journalists are members of the ruling party, and all media outlets serve up flattering reports about North Korea’s leader and superiority of North Korean socialism. Private ownership of any publication or agency of the mass media is generally forbidden. Even with the information monopoly in the hands of the dictatorial regime, all publications are reviewed by the state. Therefore any criticisms on authority are never allowed. Also typical issues such as economic hardship and famines are not allowed to report as well.
So basically the one-party regime owns all domestic news outlets, attempts to regulate all communication, and rigorously limits the ability of the North Korean people to access outside information. Listening to unauthorized foreign broadcasts and possessing dissident publications are considered “crimes against the state” so that people can get serious punishments, including hard labor, prison sentences, and even the death penalty. North Korean media portray all dissidents and the foreign media as liars attempting to destabilize the government.

As for the example of North Korean government control on media, according to Reporters Without Borders, Kim Jong-il who was former leader of North Korea, he had serious health problem but it was never talked in any North Korean media in 2008. But in April 2009, the day after the launch of a rocket, state media continuously gave away footage of exultant people vaunting the glory of state’s achievement as well as the key role played by Kim Jong-il. Even though in fact the satellite couldn’t go into orbit, no media was able to report the truth.

In terms of Journalistic freedom and safety, North Korea is one of the hardest countries for foreign journalist to access. Most recent example was two U.S. journalists were detained in Pyongyang for reporting about North Korean women.

 South Korea media system is quite different from North Korea media one. Media system of South Korea is based on a liberal model of press and so South Korea’s media environment is greatly commercialized. Advertisement and sponsorship are the main funding sources of South Korea’s media generally.

Even though South Korea is one of the very few Asian countries
that real news pluralism exists, still the government often gets involved on some issues that are seen as over-critical. Actually, under the conservative government of Lee Myung Bak, who had been in power from 2008 to 2013, South Korea’s media environment had experienced a noticeable decline in freedom of expression. The conservative government had stepped up pressure on some TV channels that were seen as over critical and the authorities had also tightened control of the Internet, going so far as to arrest Internet users for their posts, even though the country is in the forefront of Internet access.

In terms of the journalistic independency, South Korea’s journalists have much freedom compare to North Korea. However, many newspapers are controlled by large industrial conglomerates and also depend on large corporations for their advertising revenue. The thing is those large companies closely correlate with top officials in the government. Thus, it can be said that there are some issues that newspapers sidestep to cover.

Again during Lee’s presidential period, more than 180 journalists have een penalized for writing critical reports about government policies, as well as for advocating press freedom. Also government is very rigid about issues related to pro-North Korea. For example, one blogger name Park Jeong-geun was arrested for retweeting messages such as “Long live Kim Jong-il.”

North and South Korea have developed different media systems along with their cultural differences as well as politics and economy structure of countries. Still, we can see that both countries have one common aspect in their media system and that is censorship. South Korea’s censorship is not strict as much as North Korea does but still South Korea also has some limitations in freedom of media.