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President Roh Moo-hyun¡¯s claque of supporters Nosamo has announced a campaign to persuade subscribers to ditch the conservative Chosun and DongA Ilbo newspapers and take on the pro-government Hankyoreh and Kyunghyang Shinmun. The group reportedly plans to organize itself across the country and mobilize press reform bodies as well as trade unions and pro-Roh websites for the purpose.
Nosamo has done it before, attacking newspapers critical of the administration in language that was insulting at best. But it is worth looking at the background because this time the group has gone much further: it plans nothing less than a wholesale and systematic revolution of the newspaper market. Nosamo boasts of having had a decisive hand in shunting the incumbent government into office, and in projecting itself as the vanguard of the administration it is, to be sure, no ordinary civic group.
It is an organization that puts on its website a monthly program timed to coincide with laws mapped out by the ruling party to suppress press freedom. In February when the ruling party intends to pass a law to re-examine the nation¡¯s recent past, Nosamo says it will hold rallies across the country to promote an ¡°alternative press,¡± meaning the Hankyoreh, the Kyunghyang Shinmun and a provincial daily.
"Due to their financial weakness, alternative dailies cannot be promoted by conventional means," the Segye Ilbo reported Nosamo as saying. The draft project program cites provincial administrative agencies or village offices, post offices and banks as targets of a campaign designed to double the readership of the Hankyoreh. There Nosamo appears hell-bent on aping our past dictatorships in pressuring civil service agencies and public organizations into subscribing to particular newspapers.
The attempt is revealing of the patronizing attitude behind it: the group thinks we need a fifth column of power to get readers to ditch some newspapers and take up others, instead of entrusting newspaper subscription to subscribers and the market. In other words, it sees Korean newspaper readers as incapable of forming their own judgment.
It is an anachronistic way of thinking, way out of step with the era of participation the group ostensibly wants to bring about. If Nosamo were really so concerned about the slide of dailies that are to its taste - due after all to their failure to win readers - then the group must either invest in them or reform them so the public can appreciate them.
Ever since he came into office, President Roh Moo-hyun has pledged to sever what he calls ¡°collusion between power and the press¡±. Readers, audiences and Netizens alike know full well which media outlets are now colluding with power, and they are not the Chosun and DongA Ilbo. Now this vanguard of power is making advances into the press market, it is in danger of becoming a burden to a president bent on winning public trust.
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